Technorant

I was extremely excited to buy a Panasonic HDC-SD9 yesterday. And I was extremely excited when one month ago I purchased a LaCie 500 GB external hard drive for a sweet deal. Unfortunately, both purchases have come crashing down on me.

Maybe I shouldn't criticize these items. Really, the problem is Cornelius*, my Apple iBook G4, which has carried me through four years of audio and video editing, amongst other things. Cornelius has a sad 1GHz processor, a measly 40 GB of hard drive, and 1 GB RAM, and it is struggling to stay alive through all of my resource-heavy rendering.

What bothers me most is that I love Cornelius and my new camcorder**. But they don't love each other. There is virtually no software for Mac OS 10.3 that supports the AVCHD format, and I'm working extra hard to find a codec to play/convert the video files I've captured. It doesn't help that most purchasers of said camcorder use Windows or more recent Apple computers.

Why is it that purchasers of new equipment are always forced to update in order to keep up? I can't afford this shit. I bought a gorgeous new camcorder because I thought it was snazzy and handy, and I've discovered that it'll cost me another couple thousand dollars to be able to do anything with it.

I still have 6 days to return the camcorder without charge.

On to an even more frustrating item, the LaCie hard drive. I bought one, loaded it with files, then discovered that my system would randomly disconnect the thing. I exchanged it for another and still encounter the problem, but to a lesser extent.

Then, Sunday, I accidentally disconnected the hard drive without ejecting it first. No files on the drive were in use, so I thought I would escape free of injury.

THE DAMN FILES WON'T OPEN NOW and I have to completely re-edit the videos I was working on. Yes. Videos, plural, because I tend to create more than one sequence in a FCP file. The vids were supposed to be up this week, and I'm SCREWED.

I can't return the thing because (a) all my Final Cut files are configured to recognize those specific pathways (changing them takes FOREVER) and (b) I'd need to buy another hard drive to transfer them to. It's important to note that file recovery (should the hard drive kick the bucket) is at least $80 where I bought the thing - almost the price I paid for it to begin with.

I've run into so many technical problems lately that I don't even want to look at my hard drive anymore. While I love playing with my camcorder, I don't record video because I know for a fact that it won't work on my computer, and I'll have to go to school and test the files out there. But I'm almost ashamed that I knowingly bought an item that doesn't work with my system, in the hopes that somehow everything will work out.

Why do the gods smite me so?


* ... Yes, I named my iBook "Cornelius". So sue me.
** I named my new camcorder "Job".