Well, some of you may have noticed I haven't been around very much these last 4 or so days. Well, you'd be right. I have been working on a project that took up nearly 100% of my computing time since thursday, and I only finished this morning about 4 hours ago! Basically, I was converting two mini digital video tapes (MiniDV) to two DVD-Rs. I had to buy a firewire card, borrow the company MiniDV camera, and download a *LOT* of software in order to get the job done. Of course, the part that took the longest was actually learning *HOW* to use the software! Andin case anyone is wondering, I managed to do the whole project without breaking any copyright laws, or pirating any of the downloaded software. The software was all either free or trial versions. The worst part was the one or two times I encoded something for 14 hours, and then found out it was completely useless! And then the was the time I finally finished the first tape, and popped it into my DVD player to make sure it worked, and low and behold, there was *NO SOUND*....ARGH! But happily, I managed to solve all my problems, and make my deadline, which is today. The best part is, now I know I can do it. So next time we have a frantic job at work that needs to be done, I can offer to do it again... and don't think I did this for free ;-) Actually, since this job was for an order I was doing for a customer, I make about $100 on the conversion, and then my regular 1% commission on the final balance charged by my work... so I make commission on the money charged to pay for the work *I* did, LOL! Well, it's about the only way I could justify the amount of work that went into what I did anyways.
So yeah, that's about it. I've been busy. But now I have a new skill. And this skill will become more and more useful as time goes by, and more people want their home movies on DVD-Rs.
Of course, working with the companies camera has made me now want a camera of my own.... that thing was sweet! Very high quality picture *AND* sound. And I don't just mean that it could record high quality, I mean the thing played back high quality. It had it's own speakers built in, that rivaled my 4.1 altec lansing system! and the little LCD display was not so little, and very high resolution. I'm deffinatly putting one of these babyies on my wishlist :)
ok, now off to w*rk... |
