The Necessary Philosopher

Alektorophobia is the fear of chickens.

The corporate comms people revealed to me today that they do their video editing from their HD video camera in WMV format in Adobe Premiere.

Sigh.

On top of that, they believe that there is no loss in image quality by converting from HD to WMV. i.e. the output is as good as their original HD footage. SIGH.

When I tried to explain that WMV is not a suitable file format for video editing, and that I would need to render the footage in order to edit the footage, they insinuated that Final Cut (which I am using) is somehow inferior because it does not support WMV editing natively. Apparently, you can edit WMV files in Adobe Premiere Pro on Windows without needing rendering.

SIGH!!!

To begin the story, they bought a consumer-grade video camera from Sony, which outputs HD footage in .mts format. Unless you are willing to do some hacking, this format is not playable (much less editable) unless the footage is in the camera, and the camera is hooked up to a PC installed with Sony's proprietary video software (there is no Mac version... thanks Sony). To top it off, the dumb software provided by Sony will have to first convert the .mts files from the camera into a .m2ts format before doing a conversion to WMV or MPEG2 format for editing in Adobe Premiere.

I hate proprietary file formats.

My Mac estimates that rendering the entire video in Final Cut would take 23 hours. I caved in and decided to use the windows box that corporate comms was using for video editing, and it choked on the video clip. The computer locked up the two times I tried importing a 600mb piece of footage. I gave up waiting after 15 minutes each time. At least Final Cut has the courtesy to tell me how long it would take.

I hate windows.

Like most kids her age, Clare is addicted to these rides. We now try to carry around spare $1 coins whenever we go out, because Clare will make a beeline for any ride she sees.

In pain. Lots of it, especially my shoulders and back. I better make sure I keep hitting the gym. I'm getting too old to keep going through this each time I restart my exercise regime.

I finally caved in and signed up for a gym membership with the Fitness First near my office. I find it very difficult to maintain a regular exercise routine after work because we are usually shuttling between one parent's place to another for dinner, or else attending other appointments. And then I find it near impossible to drag my sorry ass out of bed before 7am in the morning, so running before work is out of the question. The only alternative left is for me to sacrifice my lunch hour a few times a week. Let's see how this works out...