Tuesday, January 08, 2008

AAAARRRGGGHHH

No, it's not "Talk Like a Pirate Day." At least I don't think so... anyway, picture that as more of a "Charlie Brown flying through the air after Lucy pulls the football away" kind of argh.

I have a very nice, expensive converter program and hardware that records VHS to DVD. Problem is, it was nice and expensive three years ago, and thus is now outdated and slow. It records VHS in real time, meaning it takes the entire running time of a video to upload onto my computer, and almost as long to "render" and convert and finally burn to disc.

This is the source of my argishness. Today was a beautiful, sunny, warm day, atypical for Pennsylvania in January. I could have been out waxing my car and enjoying the weather, but at lunchtime I decided to burn a home movie to disc instead. I had forgotten how long it takes. I'd also forgotten that the software saves on my main hard drive, which is full, so I spent a while moving stuff to the external to make room. (I have no idea how to change the destination folder for a program on the main drive to the new drive.) The video capture went fine, taking an hour and a half, and then the rendering began (another hour and a half) and then the burning. Near the end of the rendering I went to take a shower. Silly me. I came back and my program said the process was complete. I tested the DVD... nothing. I put it in a different player... nothing. It didn't burn. I learned that in order to restart the burn process, the stupid program goes through the entire rendering again.

Yes, I tried burning straight from the temporary file folder. I tried using a different burn program. Turns out the %#*$!!! program only saved three seconds of the movie. And yet, when I open the moviemaker to start the burn process over, it shows that it already used the full amount of space for the entire length and there isn't any free space left.

Before anyone suggests it, I used the computer instead of a DVD/VHS recorder because this way I can edit stuff, like volume control and graininess and all that. And of course I spent half an hour doing that before my movie got eaten. I'm just about ticked off enough to go buy a recorder anyway. Or upgrade my program, or reroute my VCR cables, or have a martini or something.

Argh.

*Update*

My movie is, in fact, saved somewhere on my hard drive. When I open the movie editor, it brings it up in its entirety. It also saved two 3-second snippets for some reason.

I changed the designation folders, so there are no space issues anymore.

It *still* wants to go through the whole rendering process again, but I'm going to set it up and let it run tonight and see what happens while I'm sleeping and not glaring at the screen.

My original VHS tape, the one I'm trying to convert, now has stuttering problems. I hope the burning etc. works this time because I think the (irreplaceable) tape is dunzo.

Monday, January 07, 2008

Caw caw!

In the movie "The Crow" a recurring song (and key line) is "It Can't Rain All The Time." The soundtrack to the film features this song. It's by Jane Siberry and is one of my favorites in that it captures the haunting, emotional tones of the film. By itself it's good; with the now-permanent Crow reference in my mind, it's great.

I always wondered, though... in spite of the title, the lyrics are "It won't rain all the time" and "can't" isn't used. Weird.

Flashback here: It Can't Rain All The Time