What I've been up to

warning, this may be a very geeky post.


Mebbe I should start a tech blog, where I post successes and failures of the amateur videographer....


Well I was supposed to return the camera to the studio on Wednesday morning after school. Naturally, this mean that I thought I didn't have to start uploading footage off of it until Tuesday night.....yeaahhh. That didn't go so well. I had problems with that, 5 hours of HD video footage eats up hard drive space pretty quickly. Left it to (as I thought) upload all night, only to come down and discover that it had stopped halfway through because Eddie's hard drive was full. There was a lot of dealings with transferring all the footage to an external hard drive.
Wound up returning the camera Thursday instead.


After that we had to decide which computer to edit the footage on. I've never taken the time to learn the ins and outs of iMovie, so I was planning to edit on the (very slow) HP desktop machine running Windows XP, with Sony Vegas Movie Studio editing software. [May I recommend SVMS, it is a very nice and easy-to-use piece of software. However if you EVER plan to switch to a Mac OS, don't buy it, because it is, as I found too late, a PC-only program.]


 Well I thought I had things nailed. I installed SVMS on my dad's computer and lugged the whole setup upstairs. My dad's comp. is from 2002, Windows XP, and only has about 70 gigs of hd space, but it is still really fast because we don't go online with it EVER.  Then the computer and I migrated upstairs to my bedroom, hitherto used for nothing except sleeping [or failing to sleep] because, well, let's just say it's not exactly climate-controlled. Fingers get NUMB in winter.....


The innocent tiny bedroom was turned easily enough into what my dad referred to as a hacker's lair. Come round the corner of the bed and you are confronted by a menacing array of sheer computing power.


Things were all fine and dandy until I actually tried to import some of the video footage into SVMS.
........


This did not go so well.


.......
Hm. No go.


I've had this problem before, the audio comes in but NO VIDEO. Then I attempted the tried-and-true method of drag-and-drop the files into the program, instead of 'File/Import'.  btw, this usually works, try it if you're having trouble opening files.  This did not work EITHER. I was becoming rather ticked.


Next we tried to view some of the video clips using Quicktime for Windows. 'Need to install more Quicktime components to view this file'.   Thinking that this would be fixed easily enough by downloading the newest version of Quicktime, I did so.   NUUP.  I had had warning that this might be the case and further research confirmed that Quicktime for Windows does NOT allow you to play hi-def.  .mov files.   Note that a .mov file IS a Quicktime file. A program doesn't play it's own format of files!  


This caused displeasure on the part of the lordly ME.  Remember all the hoopla a few weeks back with DivX media player and Gspot and all that? Well I took one of the files into Gspot to see if it could diagnose what codec was needed to play the file. NOTHING. File not recognized or somesuch.    .mov is a fairly common file, ONE WOULD THINK. 


All these files played FINE on my Mac. 
There were various other options considered, but in the event it was my non-techie mom who suggested the solution. The studio has Macbook pro laptops running Adobe FinalCut pro [professional, top of the line editing software] available for loan.   Friday I went in and got the laptop. Toted it up to the Lair and Then There Was a Scary Amount of Computing Power in the room. 
Eddie [my own macbook], dad's desktop comp (for show), dad's speakers with (to quote him) Scary Bass, and the loaned 17" macbook. Also an external hard drive and a power strip bristling imposingly. 


We are now on an even keel video-wise, have only to learn the ins and outs of FinalCut......'oh this is such a cool program! massive amounts of computing power! 17" screen laptop! professional-quality!......um how do you edit the volume levels?' 


Then two nights ago I was summoned forth from my lair by my mom, with the announcement that the computer was having a problem. The family PC, that is. Its antivirus (Norton 360) had expired, we knew it was going to happen but going to Atlanta kinda interfered with making arrangements. 


This entailed a good bit of research, and we bought Trend Micro pro version, as suggested by various geeky friends. Installed that today with surprisingly little hassle. 


Hmm, guess that about sums up the techie side of things.....I'm doing me online homework for math, logarithms great fun hehehe......anybody know how to solve an equation involving log squared?  not log (x^2)   but (log x) ^2
My book fails.....