Surfing the World Wide Waves (WWW)

Computers playing with our emotions

For today's vloggers recording video on a mobile device or SD card is simple and intuitive, but back in the early days of video editing on Non-linear editing systems we had to content with capture card compatibilities and more.

Computers playing with our Emotions

Premiere 6.5, windows 98 and the DV200

How many of us have had the misfortune of having work and losing it? Spending a lot of time video editing I have become used to having problems and finding solutions to those problems. Quite recently a new card has been isntalled on my computer so that I may use more hard drives at once. The problem is that due to the new card being put into the computer it kept crashing and something had to be done about that. The operating system was re-installed and with the re-installation there has been a problem with the codecs to the best of my understanding. There are now a few hours of de-bugging to understand what the problem is, whether hardware or software.

The emotional toll for that type of problem is quite high as you may imagine. As is commonly known video is to some extent an art form and when you finish an edit and really enjoy it it is always best to save a backup whether on the hard disk as an avi file or as an other file format as I have done. Quite a few times as a video production student I have seen student's work being lost either through negligence on their part, incompatibilities between different versions of the same program, changes in hardware within the computer, hard disk crashes and finally operating system re-installations.

Front page versions

Whilst working with front page for webmastering many times I have found that the software has played with my emotions in a number of ways. Firstly every time that you create a page within frontpage 2000 it contributes a huge amount of code which is not essential for the page to display. Furthermore to this it is going against the w3c organisation regulations whereby it may not display properly in all browsers.

The navigation structure within frontpage 2000 is also quite buggy because when a project is exported from one machine to another it is lost and if you work on your site from the web the site is still not behaving the way it should and navigation structures are occasionaly lost completely and the joyous activity of building it back to its original state may begin.

Finally the part which I found was most dissapointing with Frontpage is the amount of extra files it needs to run. If those files could be removed then the website would be far smaller on the server and only the necessary files for the site's proper functioning would be present.

As I got tired of that problem I have experimented with 1stpage 2000 which is an excellent free software.

Hope to add more with time, if you would like to share your own misfortunes then do not hesitate to contact me

Articles by Richard Azia unless otherwise indicated.

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