I’ve finally found a bit of time  to figure out this newfangled video thang we have called the Canon EOS 7D, particularly to investigate if I could deal with the 7D’s super huge HD video on my own Mac (Chris has Final Cut on his machine and has invested a lot of time learning how to edit video for some work projects, but I felt like I couldn’t really expect him to edit my video for me all the time).  I’m happy to say that iMovie has served me fairly well, given that I’ve used it all of twice in my life. While it crunches the HD video down on import, I figure for this purpose that’s just fine. Because really, who needs to see my puppy videos in full, 1080p HD?

Luna’s first couple of weeks from Sarah Mulholland on Vimeo.

Bear in mind that I am no videographer; I’m terrible at video editing and I’m still honing my skills at manually focusing the camera while at the same time following what’s going on on screen. This is challenging stuff for a still photographer! Not to mention that focusing on a small, energetic, all-black dog in low lighting is by itself next to impossible.

I should add here that Luna has easily doubled in size since most of this video was taken. As of today she’s a hefty 10 week old, and while I haven’t weighed her recently she’s easily pushing about 25 lbs or more. She’s an eating and pooping and growing machine with boundless energy (those cute puppy-crash outs of sound sleeping haven’t happened during our own waking hours since her first week with us).

We’re struggling with some behaviours, namely her lunging jumps at us while we’re sitting on the couch, bared teeth and all. This has been a very difficult behaviour to resolve. My theory at the moment is that it’s play related: she is bored and wants our attention, but figuring out how to teach her that a more appropriate kind of play behaviour is one we’ll respond to is a different ball of wax all together. I’m really hoping it’s a puppy-phase related thing that will improve over time (with our efforts as well).

In other areas Luna is a rock star. She’s got the commands sit, down, up,  and ‘on your bed’ all down smoothly; she understands what ‘gentle’ means when taking treats and she even knows her own name. She’s a pretty good fetcher too and we’re continuing trying to build on that game with ‘bring it’ and ‘drop.’ Last night she was even getting ‘speak’ down, although I only just started teaching her that because she was barking and I was taking advantage of it to my own end (I was able to do the same with Zeus). She’s ridiculously smart and eager to learn, and her focus is developing very well. I’m thinking I’ll have to take advantage of this to keep teaching her more and more complex stuff.