Videos
Post or links to videos
In the coming months we will start posting short excerpts of the various courses, classes, tastings and conference we offer. We are just gearing up production of them as we normally tape all of our events. We are using a very good, but old Hi-8 camera and it is not amenable to quick production as transferring the videos to digital media is time consuming as you have to capture it in real time and the hardware and software we currently use causes problems if you do something else on the computer at the same time. This essentially means that if you want to digitize a 2 hour tape you lose the use of your computer for at least 2 hours. Not useful if you have other things to do.
We are considering various options right now to streamline the capture of the videos, increase their quality, and make producing them a lot less time consuming for us. The first step might be to move video production to another system in the office, but I have yet yet to find one that is not used and has enough power to make this worthwhile. We’ll see about that. In the mid term we will need to get a good quality digital camcorder and a better video-editing suite. I used to have a professional video-editing suite when we still lived in Canada, but it is packed away with most of our stuff over there, and in any case the technology from over 10 years ago is very updated by now as it was all analog-based.
Anyways, enough rambling. Here is a link to our main site where some videos of our current “Introduction to Wine” course are posted:
https://www.igourmand.com/videos.html
You can also subscribe to my YouTube channel here:
http://www.youtube.com/user/DonLucito
Once we gear up production we will be posting the videos on YouTube regularly. We will also start posting cooking videos once we can figure out the logistics of doing it properly.
We lack the proper space to do it well in our kitchen right now as even taking simple photos is not easy as the contrast between either black or white countertops and our dishes that are all white makes life miserable. We are currently looking at various alternatives there too. The ideal would be to move to a bigger house where we could setup a permanent place for the cooking and wine school and operate from there. Right now we rent space in various places for our events and we could alternatively rent commercial space and have a permanent place four our events. Strangely enough a few seconds ago as I was starting to write this, somebody called us to offer us commercial space at a decent price in a large mall. We’ll see what life brings us…
BTW, if somebody in the Mexico City area, or who owns property in the Mexico City area reads this and you have a larger-sized house in a good area of town for rent, please contact me directly at jlpaquin@igourmand.com so we can discuss what you have to offer.
Lucito
I am in the process of researching various technologies to create short cooking videos for the blog. I am looking at the technical side of things now, and we already have some of the equipment here in Mexico. It is too bad that most of our stuff is still in storage in Canada as we have a full professional video-editing suite up there, but it is not much good to us right now, as we cannot ship our stuff south until we get ourselves a place big enough to store it all.
My plans are to use what we have on hand here to start, and about the only thing missing so far is a solid tripod for the video camera. I have yet to try the video-editing software we have here, but that should be a simple fix if it is not up to the task. We plan to also get a decent still camera to replace the one that died on us last winter, so that we can start posting pictures of all the dishes and preparation.
At first I want to put together some short basic cooking technique videos and to experiment with the format and the tools until we have the production side well broken-in. Once we achieve that we might start creating slightly longer videos featuring simple recipes. We will judge what the reaction will be from those and then figure out how to proceed from there with both content and format.
If you have any suggestions on what simple cooking techniques you would like to see featured in the first few videos, please leave them in the comment section, or send us an email at suggestion@igourmand.com. I am looking forward to read your feedback and suggestions on this.
Lucito