After a rather lackluster Christmas Eve on Fremont Street Downtown (which will be the subject of another article), we decided to spend Christmas Day itself on the Strip.

At noon, the Bellagio fired up some pretty sweet shows … 3 in a row, 5 minutes apart!

Talk about being in the right place at the right time.

We usually only get one show each half hour, but they gave us a real treat today.

We captured most of the shows on video, and are currently compressing them.

Unfortunately Adobe is not making it easy. We tried to buy their “Elements” editing package online because it handles MP4 files so well, but for whatever reason Adobe thinks it’s 1985, and not 2006.

We can’t pay for it and get a registration key. No, that would imply that we live in the 21st century.

Instead, they want to … get this … POSTAL MAIL the software to us after we pay for it.

So this means that until we can actually find and pay for a good program online, the videos will have a big “Adobe” logo in the upper right corner.

The full sized 100MB+ video files we took look REALLY nice (Far better than DVD quality), but we have to find a happy medium between size and video quality. Not everyone has super-fast broadband.

We will obviously re-compress the videos without the label as soon as we get a good, registered, MP4 editor. We have tons of somewhat decent Vegas videos, so we are also going to put up a “videos” section on the site as soon as we get the software issue worked out. Maybe streaming, maybe not. I am not a huge fan of “streaming” video (I like to use the video player of my choice … VLC Player … and save the files to my hard drive if I like something instead of having to download it over and over), so we’ll see.

Until then, if you would like to watch the Bellagio Christmas Fountain Shows in slightly imperfect, yet still perfectly enjoyable video files, then by all means … be my guest. Enjoy.

Here are the Bellagio Fountain Shows we recorded today.

“Viva Las Vegas” (My Personal Favorite)

“It’s Beginning to Look A Lot Like Christmas”

“Santa Baby”

“Christmas is Here”

“Christmas Musical”

But wait, there’s more. For a limited time only, if you download now while operators are standing by, we’ll throw in this Christmas Eve Fremont Street Experience Video we took last night absolutely free!!! We even edited out the panhandlers for you.

Update 12/31/2006: We finally got a registered copy of the video editing software, so some of the watermarks should be gone.