First of all, I hope everyone who celebrates Christmas had a wonderful day, got to spend plenty of joy-filled quality time with your families!
In other news: My i.Link cable and a bunch of new camcorder tapes were delivered late Monday afternoon, just before we were leaving for our Christmas Eve family dinner. Then Christmas Day was also filled with family, so tonight was the first chance I had to start MacGyvering. So I plug the i.Link cable into the fancy-pants DVD-VHS dubbing deck that my Dad has. And I follow the instructions in my camcorder manual to the letter. But something's wrong. In the manual, it says "The picture played on the connected device appears on the LCD screen of your camcorder." There is no picture on my camcorder's LCD screen. I go ahead and record the first hour of footage anyway, crossing my fingers that when I leave the dubbing menu on my camcorder, the footage will have recorded and be visible. Nothing got recorded. I try various desperate things to see if I can get an image, like using one of the old camcorder tapes (I was smart enough not to record over it, though) just in case the new tapes weren't the right kind. I tried a Grey's Anatomy DVD in case the i.Link jack on the DVD-VHS machine didn't actually connect to the VHS side of the deck. Then I tried one of my student film DVDs just in case there was some sort of copyright protection on the Grey's... DVD that prevented the i.Link from picking up the DVD image. Still nothing, still just a blue LCD screen. I was beginning to think there was something wrong with my camcorder. But it recognized that there was an i.Link cable plugged into it. So I pulled out the operating manual for the DVD-VHS dubbing deck, just in case there was something that needed to be done on that end of things that I wasn't aware of.
Turns out I was right. Turns out the the i.Link jack in my Dad's fancy-pants DVD-VHS dubbing machine only reads data coming in, it can't send anything out. Such as the Boundaries scene footage from a VHS tape. Such as the student films I've worked on that I have on DVD. AARRGGG!!
Quite honestly, I don't know what to do at this point. Obviously, I won't get my reel together anytime soon. As for the scene, should I edit the scene together even though the original footage is really crappy? Or do I dare suggest reshooting? *sigh*
5 comments:
Oh my god, technical stuff is SOOOOO frustrating. I lost my patience with that stuff SO quickly.
I had a great time chatting last night. I'm looking forward to listening to all the new music links!
My camcorder uses a small dvd disk. All I have to do is place it in the DVD drive and drag video over to where I need it. I use movie works to edit. Yours sounds complicated. I am sorry you are having this much difficulty. making movies should be fun not frustrating.
Hi Marsha,
My camcorder isn't really that complicated. The previous stuff we put up, I just download from the camcorder straight onto the computer in Windows Movie Maker, easy-cheesy. What makes "Boundaries..." different and more difficult is my own lack of knowledge of using camcorders. I never had a camcorder before we started filming stuff for YouTube. So I didn't know there was a limited amount of times you could use a camcorder tape before quality was sacrificed. And that's what happened this time. So all the MacGyvering I attempted to do is to fix that. Believe me, the next thing I shoot, it will be on a new tape, and then I won't have this problem again.
Hmm...
Can't remember if Windows Movie Maker does this, but most will capture discrete cuts. So if you record from 00:01 to 00:03 and hit stop, it will capture that as a separate clip. If it won't, and I don't remember if you already tried this, try manually setting the time in and out for capture.
And I think I already said try to run a head cleaner through it. Sometimes it's the simple things.
Good luck.
Hope everything is going good with you. Are you having any luck with auditions? Emory isn't getting any calls right now. Hopefully the Writer's Guild will come to a conclusion and auditions will pick up again.
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