Technobabble (only for those interested in the minutiae of post-production technology)

I’m going over this for two reasons:

First sympathy - I need a hug.

Secondly - for the sake of clarity - since many of you may be wondering what the f*&^ is Phillip doing instead of cutting his film?

Anyway – here’s how I spend my time - you tell me if it is the normal thing to do for a healthy young man…

Moved everything from the three 750 Gb hero drives (RGB) onto a 2TB Macpower Taurus LAN Gigabit NAS, SATA-II HDD.

This drive is considerably faster that the Phillips drives - since it uses FireWire 800 and not the USB port (Phillips drives). the Phillips drives we used do not have Firewire output and can’t be daisy chained.

The copying took well over 18 hours (overnight).

Why did you do this Phil - I hear you ask - and if you didn't - you should bloody ask...

Well - the USB port engages the CPU - so it slows down the machine – the Firewire doesn’t do this to the same degree - so faster read-write rates and better CPU performance – so say the experts. So given that Firewire 400 is even faster than USB too – you can do the math and assume that FireWire 800 is even faster still.

Disappointed that no one pointed this out at the onset when we were shopping for drives - as the USB drives we used have little post-production use as the system kept crashing…

The money keeps flowing out – I now have 7 drives that store the data but are pretty much useless in post.

More technology fun; the files are in MXF format – no one informed me that these files wrap the video and audio components into a single file that then unwraps in Final Cut Pro (FCP v6) – well they unwrap if you have the right software! Again I was left in the dark about this – so I had to shell out more moneys to purchase plug-in software to read them…

Tonight I need to review the data and check that all the files were indeed copied over before I start the organising of folders/files/shots and takes…We're talking about over 2000 files - this is of course before the actual film assembly!

Now – isn’t this fun – hands up who wants to be a film director!

This reminds me of the following Murphy's Laws:

1. Nothing is as easy as it looks.
2. Everything takes longer than you think.
3. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
4. If there is a possibility of several things going wrong, the one that will cause the most damage will be the one to go wrong. Corollary: If there is a worse time for something to go wrong, it will happen then.
5. If anything simply cannot go wrong, it will anyway.
6. If you perceive that there are four possible ways in which a procedure can go wrong, and circumvent these, then a fifth way, unprepared for, will promptly develop.
7. Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse.
8. If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something.
9. Nature always sides with the hidden flaw.
10. Mother nature is a bitch.
11. It is impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are so ingenious.
12. Whenever you set out to do something, something else must be done first.
13. Every solution breeds new problems.