Channeling Ralph Hinkley

As an avid preteen television viewer, I distinctly remember the harrowing dilemma faced by Ralph Hinkley in The Greatest American Hero. In the pilot episode he receives a magical suit from space aliens (I remember the space ship was quite impressive in that episode as was the iconic shot of him reaching upwards from his Jeep as they flew away).

The suit was capable of amazing things but he lost the manual, so was always scrambling to figure out how to use it. This led to comedic highjinks as he would fly into walls and such.

I received the Nokia N93 recently on a loan basis from folks at 1000heads (thanks to Steve). The enclosed manual is in Finnish so I've been kind of winging it, Ralph Hinkley style to figure out what I can do with the camera.

After gearing up with a universal charger and a 1 GB miniSD card (so I could charge the phone and shoot more than a couple of minutes of video), I shot and edited this piece (Sundays with Sonia) that represents a typical Sunday down at my in-laws. I've uploaded in it's unadulterated mp4 form that I downloaded from the phone to my computer via the USB connector cord.



Some observations:
• the editing is a little clunky, but hey -- it's on a phone!
• I couldn't seem to figure out how to save my project file (trimmed clips in a sequence); whenever I reopened an edited piece it was flattened to one clip
• There seemed to be some audio-synch issues that came up through the process of editing (see the clip where I'm thirsting for wine).
• I couldn't figure out how to "play" any text inserts to preview; hence the title text is oddly tiny
• Next I need to figure out how to post the video somewhere from the phone.

Note: I did find the user manual PDFs on Nokia's web site, but I was already too far gone with my Greatest American Hero riffing...