So last night after getting in to TLH at 11 I called Comcast. I was on hold for over 30 minutes, then a very nice guy from Comcast reset my modem and we were online. Thanks, fella, and I’m glad the second fiancee turned out to be a keeper.
I’m off to Sandy’s second service (she will do two every Sunday). I was going to attend the first as well, but at 8 a.m. I was so muddled from waking up at “5 a.m.” that she convinced me to drop her off and go home for a bit, then come back for the 11 a.m. service. I have on my favorite warm-weather dressy-dress–a hide-all-errors batik-print tent dress–and bright-orange dress sandals I bought at Sears for $6 that look perfect with this outfit.
I am also bringing the camcorder, the tripod, maybe the monopod, extra DV tape, a still camera, and a filter or two. We bought a camcorder together earlier this year to both tape Sandy’s current sermons and–a capability I only learned possible after buying the camcorder–convert older VHS tapes to DVD.
Camcorders are extremely easy to operate–literally, in the case of the Sony we purchased, as it has an “Easy” button that will generally give you great results, particularly if you use a tripod to avoid that jiggly Blair Witch Project effect. The hard part turns out to be getting the video into usable formats, such as DVD. It looks easy enough, but there are sand traps and pitfalls galore.
First, the companies are all complicit in a Big Lie that you can use USB to transfer video to your computer. That this is a big lie only becomes clear when after repeated failures–the video will transfer, but just try burning a DVD–you surf video discussion lists (sometimes while crying…) and find out that you need to crack open your PC and install a Firewire card. (If you have a Mac, this isn’t a problem; but most people don’t own Macs.) I just wish they had told me. Then again, I would have had a stronger hint much earlier if Sony didn’t call Firewire “iLink”–though with a little more Googling, it dawned on me that those “1394 controllers” I had seen listed on the Dell site were Firewire, or iLink, or at any rate the $15 doohickie that solved my video transfer problems.
Then there is the issue that you probably don’t want to use the software thrown in with your camcorder. Again, it all looked so easy, but after importing the video with Sony’s software, I realized the video was broken into ten-minute chunks. I searched in vain for the setting that would remedy this, then wrote Sony. Well, that’s how it works: the software inserts ten-minute breaks automatically, for no explicable reason. It’s not terrible, but it means you have to stitch two segments together (at least for most Protestant sermons, which rarely clock under ten minutes), and most video software has scene auto-detect that will try very hard to turn each piece into a chapter. That’s a nice feature, but it’s useless if the breaks between segments are arbitrary.
There’s a terrific, and free, piece of software called WinDVD that solves the import problem, but clearly, the Sony software is just for show. So I found myself testing out video software, and it was at this point I realized they shouldn’t even charge for camcorders. Like Barbie dolls, the original purchase is simply the platform for many other purchases to come… cases, filters, software, tripods, lights, and mikes; and if you read some of the truly besotten on Amazon, that’s only the beginning.
There are discussion groups for every video software, which is fortunate because the experts on these lists have the underground but bona fide instructions for actually operating the software (“UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD YOU LAUNCH BURN FROM THE TIMELINE!”–which of course, the novice will want to do because the manual encourages it). Though anyone can post answers, there is usually a small core of aficianados who will quickly slap down anyone saying anything particularly dumb.
Anyway, it took me a good month after purchasing the camcorder before I had my first usable DVD. I went through a stack of 50 DVDs (I had thought they were so cheap–well, not if you’re trashing 98% of them) before I got a DVD that was playable, had the right cues, did not inadvertently insert smarmy background music, and had a chapter. Though at that point I misspelled the organist’s name.
In any event, I will probably look like a pro creating the first DVD for Sandy’s sermon today… but oh, the path there was brutal…
