How I learned Basic Video Editing In 1 Hour

So in my engineering 123 class we have a group project.  We are assigned groups of 6 people and are asked to build a Rube Goldberg Machine on a given theme.  In our case the theme was spider-Man.  The construction went pretty well but that's not what I'm going to talk about.  so get graded on the project we had to hand in a video of the machine working.  Then for the presentation we show the same video but we can add music, credits, etc.  Being the more tech savvy person of my group I decide I will edit the video.

At that point I had zero experience with video editing, so I started with the most basic of all learning experiences, I googled "Video editing".  Within a few minutes I had picked out the free program I would use to do this, I used VideoPad by NCH software.

http://www.nchsoftware.com/videopad/index.html

At first glance it looked fairly complicated with all the options of what to do:

But after getting a chance to read everything it became more clear.

1. add media

2. drag media to "sequence" area under the windows

3. start cutting

It was also easy to add music to the video by dragging the music file to the bar under the sequence bar, right were it says "add your sound clips here"  and you can just click and drag the bar to have the music start where you want.

One nice thing about this program is that you can save the video into a lot of formats, I just used .mp4 but its nice to have options.

New Tech: multi-color, remote controled lightbulb

So finally after about 2 weeks of waiting I got this nifty little piece of tech.  Its a multi-color ( 15 colors) LED bulb.  Its remote controlled and from the remote you can change the colour, have it fade between colors, chose between 4 levels of brightness and turn it on and off.  It uses a infra-red sensor just like your tv remote so you have the point the remote more or less directly at the light bulb.  Theres a "setup" button but im not sure what it does.  I assume its to link a light bulb to a remote if you have more than 1 of these light bulbs, but there was no setup for just one.  I just twisted it into a normal light bulb socket and it worked.

I am slightly disappointed with the maximum brightness of it though.  even on the highest setting it's not very bright.  Its not even enough to light up my tiny little room, but its perfect for a reading lamp, or just something to do homework on.

Its very reasonably priced at 32$ which also included shipping.

the url for their website:
http://barlighting.com/ledrgbbulb.html


Also on their website are long strips of the same multi-color LEDs, they are much more expensive and require some installation, but I wonder if a meter long strip would provide more light than the one light bulb.