Sunday, 4 February 2018

Punishing the machine

What have I been doing on my little break, I hear you ask? Well I worked all last weekend which means that the badger cub is now finished and with the bronze foundry near Stroud. It also means that I - temporarily - have some money in my current account.

I am also working on the music/drone video, for which I will receive no money at all. It is beginning to look as though I will even be spending money on it.

This morning, the band member involved asked me to transfer him the drone footage so he could compare it with his recording before edit. There are about 15 clips and each clip is about 1.5 gigabytes. We Transfer only allow 2 gigabytes at a time, so I sent him much smaller renditions of the same clips, amounting to about 1.5 gigabytes. I pressed send and was told it would take three hours to go through, so I thought I would while away some time here. Then I might have a shower, cook dinner and before you know where you are it will be time for The Archers.

I made the mistake of putting two clips of the raw footage from the external hard drive onto the desktop of my old iMac, and the whole machine began to groan under the weight. It eventually fell to its knees, begging me to delete the clips, so I did.

This would explain why I had to get my hard-drive wiped and re-installed recently. I sent the machine mad with fatigue by putting every bit of raw footage onto the front. Poor thing. And I just thought it was a bit of rogue stuff smuggled in by a scammer.

Think of it not so much as the straw which broke the camel's back, more like the other two haystacks.

14 comments:

  1. When my community was planning its bicentennial, I hopped right into the committee (so they would get it right!). A good friend who lived here longer than I did not join, and I asked why. "Being on a committee is like opening your checkbook." She was exactly right.

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    1. That doesn't seem to apply to British committees. They all fight each other viciously for limited government or private funds, and the Arts are on the back of the queue. The queue is getting longer and the shareholders are getting more twitchy. Oh God - I am about to start swearing again.

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  2. After 1.6 hours waiting for the measly 1.5 gigs of footage to be sent to him, We Transfer said that the mission had failed and suggested I started again. That is three hours out of my Sunday.

    I told him that he would just have to wait for the SD card. Grrr...

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  3. People keep suggesting wonderful free editing systems and transfer utilities like 'My Airbridge' to me, and I have to remind them that it is not my life's ambition to become a film editor. All I want to do is make one little drone film. I would have an easier job becoming a steam-engine driver. I have friends who drive steam-engines.

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  4. Replies
    1. No. It is run by a professional company. Rules and regs.

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  5. I was going to mention my transgendered friends and then I realised that this is the wrong blog - so won't.
    Good to see you back in blog land.

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  6. Life always seems such a series of ups and downs for you Tom.

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    1. Isn't it for everyone, Weave? My downs are in alignment with my ups, so I am lucky. You, I hope, are now on a prolonged up!

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  7. I can't even upload a short video to YouTube any more. Not enough Ooomph in the wires.

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    1. You should be able to stream videos without any problem, it's storing them that takes up the oomph. Have you updated Flashplayer recently? That should do the trick.

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