I Told My Parents I Was Getting a Mac...

For my 18th birthday, about a month before I arrived at Shimer for the start of my first semester, my parents got me a digital camcorder. I had been wanting one for a long time, as I like to make movies, and I'd become a pro at doing cool things with Windows Movie Maker. So of course, all I needed was to be able to capture my own footage. 

But roughly two months before my birthday, my laptop started to do things that no computer has ever done before. There was absolutely nothing wrong with it, yet it wasn't working. I attributed this to my innate ability to kill PCs (accurately, as I found out when I gave it to my brother as a Christmas present and it works perfectly for him) and thus decided to buy a Macbook once I was in Chicago. 

I told my parents this. Repeatedly. I also told them that since I would have to learn iMovie, I didn't need a camcorder right away, and I would earn the money to buy one myself so that I could make sure it was Mac compatible. They bought me one anyway.

It's a great camcorder, but it took me until this semester to try to put the video onto my computer. Here I encountered a huge problem. My camcorder saves video to its hard drive in a format that is not recognized by Macs. Darn. 

Three weeks... three whole weeks I tried to find a way around it. And to no avail. I tried downloading free media players and movie editors in the hopes that they would be able to import the videos. I posted a question on Yahoo answers, tried every answer I got, all for nothing. Then I found out that there was a downloadable video converter, free from Apple, that should remedy the problem. But alas, not even that recognized the video files as being video!!!

So finally, I caved and went on a steady, two hour google search. And, on amazon.com's listing for my camcorder, in a review left by another Mac user, I found my solution. 

It's another video converter, called iSquint. The makers stopped selling it, and I think it may be a miracle I found a free download of it somewhere on the internet. It took an hour to convert all the video I had on my camcorder. It should have taken less time, according to the little bit of text telling me how many more minutes it would take. At some point, after it had said "Less than a minute remaining" for several minutes, I discovered that the makers of the converter had a sense of humor. The text changed itself to say "... I lied. File 1 will be done when it's done." 

And I must say, I really appreciated that. Sure, it stayed that way for 20 minutes, but it was very honest in the fact that it was taking longer than expected, and there was no clue as to when the file would be finished converting. It saved my sanity, I do believe. And on top of it all... I can edit my videos! Hoorah! 

Then today, the irony hit me. I'm on the campus of a technology school. I have many IIT friends. My neighbors in the dorms fix people's computers for them. There had to be someone I know who would have known how to fix the problem, and I didn't bother asking anyone. 

I think I nearly laughed myself silly. 

Comments

[Sara Hall]

I'm probably going to stick with iSquint for now. And I've just gotta adjust to using new video programs. Took me ages to learn cool tricks with Windows Movie Maker, so I suppose it'll take me ages to learn those tricks with iMovie. But it doesn't die and lose my work, which is what counts. =]