Abysmal, Beastly, Contemptible, Damnable, Epic Failure*

Long ago, I was a Pirate King. I'm retired now, but it was a heady time for a young and foolish adventurer. The video records of this wild time were mine to cherish, edit and burn to DVD (you know, like you do when you're a Pirate King. That's what makes it glorious). It cannot be denied that I wallowed in the deep well of placidity that comes from confidence in both oneself and one's machine in turning out a relatively terrific product in quite a short time. There was pride. I'm sure from the title you've guessed there was also a fall. If all you need know is that danger befell, know it and move on with your life. For those interested in the gory technical details, they are available after the jump.




I had all the chunks of film on my computer, arranged pretty much in the order I wanted. Let it be said first that I had had to purge my computer of tens of gigs of stuff, applications and media and the other digital detritus one accumulates in this modern age. Not wanting to delete it all, I'd burned some to disc and navigated the torturous path of connecting my doddering Old Laptop-type Geriatric Antique (OLGA) to relieve the burden on Ozymandias, here. (It was supposed to be easy, but somehow managed not to be). Anyway, in the end, I had 70+ free GB, which should have been more than enough room for one show.

It was unfortunate that the only whole-cloth recordings of us were made at the last show, not our better performance. We had some footage of the good show, but the recording was started late and suffered from some kind of decay, making some of it untenably choppy. (I'd have happily survived the choppiness to get the recording of me where my voice didn't break like a little boy's, but I was obligated to think of the Bigger Picture, so used the actually useful footage. Curses). In the main, the good show footage was not salvageable as a whole. I tried a little audio magic with it, wherein the  better sound from our good show could be dubbed over our actual video, but the trouble with live performance is that it's different from time to time. Perhaps someday when I have infinite patience and RAM, I will make a bad kung-fu movie dub... Another time. On to the major catastrophe.

For the DVD, I needed some clips of the show to play during menus and so on. I actually wanted to use some clips from the otherwise un-salvageable but better show. So I went through and found them, made the cuts so they were only about 30 seconds apiece, and tried to move them out of iMovie to where I could use them by simple dragging and dropping into iDVD. I have done this before, between these two programs, and it has never proven a problem.

Already in the day, iMovie had hung up and quit on me a few times. This is definitely the most footage I had ever asked it to accommodate, and I do prefer the older version of the program, so I wasn't too horribly frustrated with it yet, just slowly tearing a few hairs out now and then. As I tried to move my selected clips to another folder, I noticed the copying time was incredibly long. When I checked the status bar, it said it was copying 50MB... of a 4.86GB file. The clip in question was 30 seconds long. Unless I had secretly made it into an IMAX extravaganza of millions of beautifully rendered, texturally complex figures in 3D, 30 seconds should not have occupied that kind of space. After trying to cut the footage several different ways to no avail, and restarting iMovie in case it was a one-off glitch, I finally sighed and agreed to wait for the stupid thing to be moved so I could use it in iDVD.

As soon as I tried to move it into iDVD, the program crashed. When I restarted it, it found files in the trash - the file I'd been trying to move in. I rescued it from the trash, put it in, and then got the opportunity to look at the whole thing - watch it, I mean. After the 30 seconds I'd selected the clip to be, the screen went gray and kept playing for 20 more minutes, according to the timer (I didn't watch all 20 minutes of grayness). 20 minutes of gray was the rest of the 4.86 GB. It was at this point that iMovie died again. Perhaps there was swearing, it all just seems so foggy now... It was proving to be a very time-consuming affair, but having checked my memory, I decided I could just do each clip one at a time and afford the disk space. A hassle, but one that would allow me the control I wanted.  When I brought iMovie back up, it cut and moved a few clips just like normal, no 4GB anythings. There was great rejoicing, and a few more attempts, and then the gray screen came back. I'd already committed myself to the action of copying them even though they were bulky and would have to wait to be pared down, but I will not deny that there was teeth-gnashing.

It turned out, iDVD quit every time I moved in a clip. It wasn't just a one-off. iMovie, feeling left out, also had some dramatic fainting spells. This was... frustrating. Added to that, things started going very slowly, and I got the spinning beach ball of death a few times. I was confused. I checked my hard drive, and all but 1.1GB was gone from my memory!

I am not my mother (bearer of several fancy degrees that make her much fitter than I to determine what ails a computer), but what I have deduced is this: every time - and I do mean every time - I made, moved, or used a clip, the computer kept track of it by functionally creating a new version of it, and every version was like a censored version of the original; the stuff I didn't want was just hidden under gray screen, instead of black marker. It was storing clips in the same amount of space that the original footage occupied - like packing a single real peanut in a refrigerator-box of packing peanuts. There were about four refrigerator-boxes for any one clip I tried to manipulate, which consumed memory at a fantastic rate, as you can imagine. I tried chucking the bits I wasn't using, and they went to the trash, but that doesn't actually give you the space back. Eventually, when a pop-up warning said my computer was going to stop being able to function at all, packed to the gills with gray footage as it was, I emptied the trash.

I CHECKED THE NAMES OF THE FILES IN THERE. THEY WERE CLIPS, ALL OF THEM! (Ahem. This is just my disclaimer to deter any who want to shake their heads and mutter "PEBKAC" under their breaths. Or more loudly). I really did check them. I check the trash before I empty it every time. That said, I did a stupid thing a moment later. When I told it to empty, a message popped up saying I needed to close iMovie first. I assumed this was because I was telling it to remove stuff I'd i.d.'d as junk in iMovie too. I really should have thought that through more carefully. It deleted everything. The whole project. Every. Last. Second.

This is especially weird because the clips I was using, like I said, came from the good show, which was entirely and wholly separate from the footage I actually used to make the movie itself. Also, did I mention the part where only clips were what I deleted? And that I checked them all? Because they were, and I did, and everything was still gone. About 12 hours of work, between the rip, title, chapter, transition where necessary, DVD arrangement... all gone in the rustle of Mac OSX's sound effect for taking out the trash.

As far as I can tell, each clip was like a quantum-entangled particle with the whole iMovie project. (Quantum entangled particles are the cool ones that do exactly what the other one is doing, no matter how far apart they are. They have cool sci-fi potential in the areas of faster-than-light communication and stuff, but the point here is that each does exactly what the other does. There's no hierarchy between them). Deleting one bit deleted it all, just like copying one bit had copied it all. Up until that point, I had only deleted within the two programs (each of which has its own disposal bin). So I found myself at 10 p.m.-ish, with nothing at all to show for a day of garment-rending, teeth-gnashing technical woe.

It's enough to make you go Linux.

*I stopped after E for you, Mom.