Testimonial:

Retired and Still Learning - Snowbirds Share Memories on Video

Pinnacle Real User- Darel Harrington

Temperatures of 48 degrees (C) in the shade during the summer may not send you packing for Yuma, Arizona, but the 26 degree fall and winter months give tens of thousands of people reason to throw down their snow shovels and gas up the caravan.

Located in the Sonoran Desert on the beautiful Colorado River, 380 species of birds aren't the only bi-annual visitors. Yuma is also one of the most popular snowbird destinations inflating the local population from just over 100,000, to double that count through the winter.

A self-proclaimed snowbird himself, Darel Harrington calls North Dakota home during the summer, but winters in Yuma's finest luxury vacation facility for seniors 55 and above, Sun Vista RV Resort, in part because of the great weather, and in part because of the people, activities and events.

"90,000 snowbirds show up in Yuma each winter, so there's always something going on to photograph, like the annual balloon festival and air shows," said Darel. "Things that would normally happen in North Dakota during the summer happen during the winter in Arizona, so we take pictures of them."

The upscale RV park that Darel calls home has about 1,200 spaces and offers snowbird residents a broad range of special interest clubs including a Pinnacle Systems photo/video club.

"As you can imagine, there are a couple thousand people there that have nothing to do but play," explained Darel. "The people down there are retired, but they don't stop. They want to share what they're seeing and doing with their kids and grandkids. A lot of them are photographers, and a lot of people wanted to generate slideshows. I'd been using Pinnacle Studio™ for the last several years and I knew quite a bit about how to use Pinnacle Studio to create great slideshows and produce them to DVD, so I gave a presentation in November, talking about Pinnacle Studio 11 and how you go about making a slideshow to our computer club. As a result, we formed this picture/video group."

During the season, the group meets twice a week for an hour and a half to two hours discussing photography, videography and how to use Pinnacle Studio to produce creative slideshows.

"We have about 80 members in the computer club," said Darel, "and some 20 of those took an interest in the video/picture presentation and got into Pinnacle. We imported the photos to Pinnacle Studio™ and added transitions, music and other features. The group has done some surprising things already! One club member visited Utah's Bryce Canyon Park and took a whole bunch of pictures then put together a nice slideshow using Pinnacle that she shared with us. Every week we meet, someone presents a DVD that they created."

Using the computer club's projector, the members of the Pinnacle Systems group take turns playing their DVDs and projecting them on the wall for the entire group to see, enjoy and offer constructive criticism.

"So far, every time we've met, we've had two or three people that have put together short videos using Pinnacle Studio and have wanted to share them with the group," said Darel. "We discuss it and say, 'Hey, well that looks pretty good!', 'How did you do that?' and 'You might want try this.'"

Eventually, word got out about the Sun Vista Pinnacle Club, and before long, a Country Roads RV Park resident made a trip up the road and at the computer club, he saw the posting for the Pinnacle Club meeting on the bulletin board.

"He contacted me, and we invited him over", said Darel. "He was excited about what we were doing and wanted to do something similar at their RV park, so I put together a presentation and a couple of us went over to Country Roads and presented Pinnacle to their bunch. That was closer to the end of the season, but they had quite a few people try out Pinnacle Studio and bring their DVDs over to share as well."

"I thought the response I got was really good", said Darel. "Just being able to share experiences, that's one of my favorite things about it; and I want other people to be able to do the same. When you put your pictures and videos on DVD, using a tool like Pinnacle Studio , you can play them on any player attached to a TV anywhere and the quality is great."

Since retiring, Darel and his wife have had the opportunity to take several trips including vacations to the Panama Canal, Australia, Costa Rica, Scandinavian Countries, and two or three visits to Europe.

"I made up a DVD of each trip", said Darel. "I've tried to use other video editing software packages and I think Pinnacle Studio is the most user-friendly. Producing a DVD is a better way to save and share your content. In the past, if you went on a trip and you took a few pictures, you'd just throw them in a box and that's about it. Making a digital slideshow is easy, and it makes it easy to share your pictures and videos with others. Personally, I like being able to go back and look at them whenever I want." The ability to easily add video is also a great feature of Pinnacle Studio

On their trip to Australia, Darel and his wife went with seven other friends, several small digital cameras, one film camera and a single video camera. At the end of the vacation, Darel and his travel companions had taken well over 1,000 pictures and several hours of video.

"The challenge was to boil all that content down into one hour, and then share that with the rest of the group," said Darel. "They all gave me their pictures and I gave them back a DVD of our trip. That worked out well. It's like a travel log, I guess. I made lots of copies of that DVD to share that experience with my other friends."

With his digital slideshows and video vacation memories creatively organized and ready to share, Darel was recently able to find and send the DVD he made of his trip to the Panama Canal, to another couple who was planning a similar trip.

"I burned a copy of the DVD I had made from when my wife and I went through the Panama Canal and sent it off to our friends," said Darel. "It gave them sort of a preview of what they were going to see. They really enjoyed that."

Working with computers since 1965, at times even programming, this retired, co-leader of the Sun Vista Computer Club, could easily be classified as an experienced computer user. Still, Darel insists that his success with Pinnacle Studio (as well as the success that he has seen other Yuma snowbirds have with it), cannot be attributed to a person's personal level of basic computer knowledge.

"I think Pinnacle Studio is easy enough for people of every level of computer experience to use," said Darel. "With the computer club in Yuma, you're talking about older people who are retired, and a lot of them don't know anything about computers. This one guy, from Canada, was down in Yuma and he had taken a bunch of photos in Alaska that he wanted to preserve on DVD. He never had a computer before, let alone worked with Pinnacle Studio, so he took the opportunity and got involved in our club. He probably worked 24 hours a day on that Alaska DVD, but he was able to put together a slideshow of his Alaska trip on his own using Pinnacle Studio 11 and his brand new laptop. Sure he made mistakes and whatever, but he hung in there and produced a DVD he could share and be proud of."

Yuma and he had taken a bunch of photos in Alaska that he wanted to preserve on DVD. He never had a computer before, let alone worked with Pinnacle Studio, so he took the opportunity and got involved in our club. He probably worked 24 hours a day on that Alaska DVD, but he was able to put together a slideshow of his Alaska trip on his own using Pinnacle Studio 11 and his brand new laptop. Sure he made mistakes and whatever, but he hung in there and produced a DVD he could share and be proud of."

Other than vacation travel log DVDs, Darel has also made a few compilations for family too, including one for his granddaughter's graduation, which starts with baby photos and takes the viewer through basketball clips and other high school memories.

"I really like how easy Pinnacle Studio is to use," said Darel, "just being able to grab pictures or video clips and drop them where you want them in the timeline. I think editing video clips is probably Pinnacle's strongest suit because you can sub-divide clips and super-impose one over another. I also like being able to chop out section like I've done some wedding videos so I can have the sound from one clip and the picture from another," Darel continued, "and you can use two cameras and edit them together too. I've gotten some pretty good results from that. The audio editing for the background music and narration is also a great feature. Using Pinnacle Studio has just been a very positive experience."

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