Video Geekery.

03 January 2002

(Hey Di, here's your update.)

I must be losing my Luddite tendencies.

For the longest time, I've avoided buying new technology just to keep up. As long as my old stuff worked okay, I didn't bother upgrading. How many software developers in 2001 still used a Pentium 120 at home?

I even refuse to use a modern e-mail client, because of the dangers of script viruses and HTML-formatted pages making your computer do things behind your back. Trusty old Eudora Light version 1.5.2 from 1995, thank you very much. It's not even a 32-bit application, so it still struggles with long filenames! Works fine though, shows me what people write to me, lets me write back.

Well, times are changing. Actually they've been changing for the last year.

For Christmas 2000, Lisa and I got a spanky cool digital video camera. In June 2001 I bought myself a spanky cool 1.33 GHz Athlon PC, because I figured one day I'd get around to playing with digital video editing, and that wasn't going to happen on the 120 MHz Pentium. So I got a big powerful machine. Now I hate building machines from scratch, because I tend to customise and configure them to within an inch of their life and it takes forever to reproduce an environment I like. So I cheated and cloned my old Pentium 120's Win98SE system drive and just booted it up on the new hardware. Added a handful of motherboard patches, BIOS upgrades, and a cable internet connection, and the result? A system that worked pretty good, but had some flaky tendencies. The old Pentium was a lot more stable. Then again, I didn't ask the Pentium system to do nearly as much as the Athlon system. It was so slow I didn't even bother with a virus checker. The Athlon, on the other hand, had to put up with things like a firewall and a localproxy server. After browsing the pages at GRC.COM, I wasn't going to take any chances with my computer's security. But unfortunately the migrated system reacted to heavy multimedia use by crashing a lot. So much for digital video editing.

Okay, well remember I got married in September? Wedding video. Two very cute little girls were born into Lisa's family during 2001. More video. The end-of-2001 holiday season? Even more video. I figured it was time to stop dubbing the high-zoot digital camera onto low-tech VHS tape. Time to whip my computer into shape.

So, spending the week after Christmas very carefully upgrading to Windows 2000, I was amazed to end up with a computer that I could slap around a little and not worry about it crashing. I hate to praise Microsoft too much but the upgrade worked, apart from a few obscure applications and one notably important one (but that's another story). I didn't have to reconfigure the whole damn machine and reinstall 30 applications. Yayyy!!!

Then I spent a day fiddling with Adobe Premier and found that I know nothing about video editing. Premiere looks very imposing, kind of like a professional film editing desk. Probably because that's what it's supposed to look like. And probably because you're expected to have some of the skills of the profession in order to use it.

Well, at least I figured out how to capture from the video camera and do simple edits like trimming the ends to make a clip. And I'm almost sure I'm nearly aware of most of the available video compression formats. I even figured out how to create a VCD so you can play the movies on a standard DVD player!

So, if you've made it this far, I reward you with 17 seconds of footage from Jenna and Keisha's very first Christmas.

Click here, or click either picture to download the clip (574KB size). It's in Windows Media format (*.wmv) - you might need to download the codec to see it.

Keisha Rose Caulfield

Jenna Kate Sykes

Note: Slower computers might have trouble playing the WMV format due to its high compression. Here is another version of the clip, in MPEG format - it's similar file size, but lower quality (not as compressed) so it should be easier to play on a slow machine.
Lower quality clip here (603KB size)

 

Oh, and one application that didn't survive the Windows 2000 upgrade? My trusty 16-bit Eudora Light version 1.5.2. So I finally upgraded to a more modern e-mail client. You guessed it... Eudora Light version 1.5.4, the 32-bit release, and it's almost exactly the same! Ah, the good old days are here to stay...