We learned today that it appeared that Frank was not suffering from a spread of his cancer, but had merely had a bad infection in the tissue surrounding his chinbone. The doctor felt that draining the abcess and a course of antibiotics would control the problem, while they kept checking that there was no spread of the cancer. With that off our minds for the moment, we thought about how we could save the idea of the trip to Bordeaux. While it was too late to join them on Kanumbra (they were leaving Castets-en-Dorthe to go down the Garonne today), we floated the idea of joining Stuart and Christine in Bordeaux by train, then coming back up the Garonne on Hilda May with them. They thought this was doable, so we agreed to meet them in Bordeaux on Wednesday. In this way, we can retain flexibility to go to Bern quickly if Frank’s condition worsens, without sitting around in Moissac all the time (although we were cautious about venturing any further away from Moissac).

As the weather was still very warm, Rita took the opportunity to do some more swimming at St Nicolas de la Grave. While she was away, I got started on preparing a YouTube video for her presentation at the International Pan Conference and Panorama being held in Trinidad & Tobago in early August. Her paper, on the use of the steel pan in music therapy after a natural disaster, had been accepted, but she can not be there in person to present it. So she made a Powerpoint presentation, then recorded her commentary to go along with the slides. My job today was to overlay and coordinate the commentary with the slides, and then convert that into a video that could be uploaded to YouTube so that they could play that at the conference. Didn’t sound all that difficult, but as always the devil is in the detail. Firstly, getting the timings and transitions right so that the voiceover synchronised with the slides was a fiddly process. Secondly, I knew from previous experience some years ago that you could save the final presentation as a movie (to avoid losing the synchronisation you had just worked so hard to achieve). I found this option in Mac Powerpoint 11 and converted it to a movie, but when I replayed it, there was no sound from the voiceover. Thinking I had done something wrong, I did it all again, and again, with no success. I then went Googling, and found out that in their wisdom Microsoft had removed the saving of sound with the movie in the latest Mac version of Powerpoint (having had it in there for the previous 10 years!). This change coincided with them finally getting the sound feature to work in the Windows version of Powerpoint.

So I used a workaround of playing the Powerpoint file as a slideshow (with sound) and using Quicktime to do a screen recording (including sound). By late evening, I finally had the presentation as a video with sound and had uploaded it to YouTube. If you’re interested, you can see it below.