Oh jeez, that's two. Now I'm sorry for the American Girl jokes. Mea culpa. Mea culpa.

I am not obsessed with American Girl. I'm sure it's a fine product with empowering messages for girls, which is why it seemed funny to claim that I--a grown man with no children--had become obsessed with it and its wiki. I have nothing against the franchise or its fans. It seems perfectly charming.

Next major project: converting WhiteHouseMuseum.org to Weebly or something.

Oh, yeah, that last bit is good advice. That's probably easier than what I assumed would be the "right" way.

The only real problem now is glitches showing up in the final output. I don't continue to work while APE is creating the output, so maybe I've got something running in the background that hogs clock cycles for a moment, creating a glitch? Is this a known thing?

Edit: On the other hand, APE crashes *frequently* in Windows 7, so... maybe it just sucks.

What's the "real" way to do credits? The advice I took was to create the list as a long image in Photoshop, then animate the list to scroll up. Clumsy, for something that every movie needs.

Okay, half-way thru this Civil War lecture, and it's going well except for when half my lecture clip got corrupted and APE crashed repeatedly. (Deleted the bad clip and reinserted.) I'm dropping in maps and pictures of generals as they get mentioned, even doing pan-and-zooms to follow armies moving across the map.

Even so, I'm fighting a pitched battle against the cameraman. He's as unskilled as I am. There's only so much jerky panning and zooming that I can cover by going to a map.

I'll post a rough version tomorrow morning for those who are curious. I appreciate the advice.

I bought Adobe Premiere Elements and am finding it a bit unintuitive (not unlike Photoshop Elements).

Anybody who wants to give me a quick Skype tutorial on how keyframes work would have my gratitude. Also, everything is blurry even after rendering, whatever that is.

Premier Elements seems more my speed. But at the same time I often feel limited by Photoshop Elements. I use it and an old copy of Dreamweaver a lot. I'm actually kind of tempted to go the full Adobe Creative Cloud "all apps" route, but I'd rather not have to tell people I have a hobby where i pay for software like it's medicine.