Today is Tax Day but the lesson learned had absolutely
nothing to do with taxes!
Randy and I went to the air show at Davis Monthan AFB on
Sunday, courtesy of our friend Laura. She’s a member of the DM50 (doesn’t
matter exactly what that is, suffice it to say the members take very good care
of our servicemen and their families) so we had front row seats for the show
which this year featured the USAF Thunderbirds. And the weather was
fantastically great: clear blue sky, about 70F (22C), and a slight breeze
blowing. (Saturday’s show was cold and rainy!) Good chance to practice using my
video camera! And I got some awesome shots.
You know there is a “But…” coming up.
But, after I imported all the MTS files into Windows Live
Movie Maker and saved the project, I thought I had done everything I needed to,
so I broke my cardinal rule of digital photography—you KNOW where this is
going!—and didn’t back up the MTS files before I formatted the SD card. Well,
WLMM doesn’t save the MTS files when it makes a “project,” (a .wlmp file). Who knew? I certainly thought WLMM would have
backed up everything it needed to make the .wlmp project file. It didn’t.
About five hours later and $39 poorer, I was able to resurrect
most of the files (I used
Stellar Phoenix
Photo Recovery, by the way and no, I have no ties to them). The resurrected
video clips aren’t as good as the originals because many of the original 30-40
second clips were broken up into 6-7 second clips by the recovery process, but
at least much was salvaged, so now I can do what I was planning on doing,
practicing making a video.
That’s for tomorrow, however! Meanwhile, here are a few of
the stills of the Thunderbirds that Randy got with my Nikon as well as a few
others that I took when I wasn’t trying to use the camcorder.
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| Sky Divers |
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| Known colloquially as the Pregnant Guppy. Doesn't look like it could get off the ground, does it?! |
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| Notice the one larger canopy? That's the one that can carry two! Would I love that? You betcha!! |
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| Thunderbird formation take-off |
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| So beautiful! |
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| Heading over the top upside down |
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| Arrowhead formation |
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| What a beautiful airplane! |
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| Don't hiccup! |
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| Very difficult five-ship formation |
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| Four-ship diamond formation |
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| All six Thunderbirds in close (!) formation |
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| The Thunderbird finale, the Starburst |
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| Helicopter refueling |
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| Helicopter rescue in spite of mucho swirling dust! |
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| Randy and our generous host, Laura |
