As I mentioned in a previous post, I want to begin the diatribe of my recent experience helping a family member on a school project. It involved putting together a powerpoint presentation with a video of a speech and delivered electronically. No biggie right? That’s what I thought too. Let me give you a little background on my computer evolution.
My first laptop I got was two years ago, it was an Acer Aspire 1711. A huge freakin’ Pentium 4 beast that actually used desktop components for its innards, hard drive, ram, etc. So it was big and heavy, like 15.5 lbs. I was constantly trying to squeeze more performance out of it for audio recording, so I was constantly fiddling. Well, one saturday I was fiddling and I didn’t ground myself before touching the motherboard. Didn’t think about it until I tried to power it on, no go. Puppy was fried. A $1000 paperweight, and a heavy one at that. I sold it for parts and started looking for the next one.
I found a Dell 9300 that was pretty loaded and one of the top PC laptops at the time. It had a great graphics card, for a little gaming, and plenty of power to do the audio recording that I do. Got a 3 yr full coverage warranty on it too, so no worries for three years. I really have enjoyed the laptop itself, from a hardware point of view. Now as far as personalizing it…my workspace doesn’t look like Windows, due to a "shell" replacement program called Litestep. Here’s a screen shot of what my desktop looks like.
Litestep is highly customizable through script and text files and it really was my introduction to any kind of programming language. Although not PHP or anything, it was an intro. Right click on the desktop gives a popup menu, shortcuts at the top with built in menus, virtual desktops, command line on the taskbar, etc; lots of functionality, unlike XP’s defualt shell. I tell you all this to let you see the progression from Windows user to a Windows user not really satisfied with how Windows works, but I could still do everything that I want to do.
I’ve got several friends with Macs and they’ve always intrigued me, but I just hadn’t gotten to that point yet. This week escorted me oh so conveniently to "that point".
So I’m helping with this project, we’ve recorded the 5 minute speech to DVD using a DVD recorder. We’ve put the slides together using Powerpoint 2003 on XP Home. The program that we’re going to use to combine these elements is Microsoft Producer, a free download for Office 2002 or 2003. So…this is on Saturday, about 4:30pm, we sit down to import the video file from the DVD into the computer and ultimately into Producer. Well, you’d think maybe Producer would have the functionality to import DVD (Vob) files since most folks are going to use some kind of digital camera to make their recording, not so. It only works with Avi, Wav, Wmv, etc. files. Ok, no biggie, I’ll convert it to Avi using another program AutoGordian Knot then I’ll have to trim it using yet another program called VirtualDub since, we discovered, Producer ain’t so good at any kind of editing.
So a total of three programs in use at this point to do one thing, get the movie file into Producer. Well Producer proceeds to lock up every 5 minutes, literally. You could basically do one or two things, then lock. That happened for two hours on Saturday and 5 hours on Sunday. You’d make enough progress that you just had to keep going. So I got the presentation close to done on Sunday, all slides synced to the speech and everything. So far I’d spent 7 hours on what literally should have taken 1 hour tops. Sunday night, Producer will not "Publish" the presentation, basically put it in a method that you can display it on another medium. It hangs on one of the Publishing Wizard screens. So I give it to mom, with a copy of Producer and the Presentation to work on her home computer, a Dell she bought last year. Well, the version of Office is pre-2002 so Producer won’t work. So I decide to take it to work on Monday and load it up there to see if we can finish this thing.
Monday I download and install Producer onto my work computer which is running XP Professional. It’s the same Producer file and installer that I downloaded for my computer. Mmmkay. When I try to open up the Producer presentation I spent all day Sunday working on, I get a message saying it can’t be opened. What the……? It’s a Producer file? Is there some different version for XP Professional than XP Home? I’ve got Office 2003 loaded on both computers so it couldn’t be that. ARRRrrggggghhhhh. So now I have to start over and reproduce everything on my work computer, by importing the videos and the slides. Of course the first error message is that Producer can’t play the video files cause it doesn’t have the video codecs needed. For the love of Pete, so I go huntin’ codecs to download. Get ‘em and start working on the project. Producer continues to lock up every 5-10 minutes. Driving me batty and raising my blood pressure I’m sure. I get it completed, but there’s a problem with an imbedded video in the Powerpoint portion. The audio’s not lining up.
So this pushes us to Monday evening, then Tuesday morning where I’m trying to get the Audio lined up. I’ve got a golf tournament Tuesday afternoon so I work from 9 until 12 on it, and it’s still not right. UUUugggggghhhhh!!! So I go play golf with a depressed phone call to mom saying it’s not done and is not ready to be turned in. Okay we’ll figure something out.
During golf I get a call from mom. The presentation is supposed to be no more than 5 minutes. She initially understood that 1 point would be taken off for every 20 seconds you were over, but in reality it was 1 point is taken off for every second over 5 minutes. Our presentation was 5:11. Crap. It’s a 20 point assignment. Crap. So we decide to rerecord the speech taking the embedded video in the powerpoint out and trimming it down just a bit. Which basically means, time to start over, and Producer is still locking up and acting like a freakin’ idiot.
We re-record, re-convert, re-trim, re-import, re-sync the slides and everything from about 8pm until 12am on Tuesday night. We go to Publish, this being the absolute last step mind you. Producer hangs at 99% and won’t finish. I’m flippin’ out at this point. So I do it several more times and even let it run over night….hangs at 99%
So back to work I take it on Wednesday to work on it. Of course Producer at work can’t open the Producer file that we created last night. Wouldn’t you know it. So on Wednesday morning, I have to re-import the files and start the project over, for the fourth time. To make a long-story longer, I get it completed, finally get it published and now I’ve got to figure out how to email the many, many files that Producer creates when you publish it to your computer. Holy crap, how about making this an easy process!!!! There are no less that 20 files and who knows which one is the actual presentation. Well, I get it figured out, burn it to disc so it’ll autoplay when inserted and we get it sent off, electronically and overnighted. WWWwhhhhhheeeeeewwwwww!!!!
This process was just stupid. Producer was just stupid. How about a program that’s intuitive and actually works. Like won’t crash or lock-up the computer. Producer locked up every computer I put it on and it’s functionality was non-existent. Unfortunately, I didn’t find another program out there that did Powerpoint and Video, other than one by Camstudio, but it wasn’t quite what we needed.
All that to say, I’ve been toying with the idea of getting a Mac. No more toying. I’m getting a Mac as soon as I can afford it. I want to thank you Micro$oft for finally making the decision clear and easy for me. I’ve heard it and I believe it.
Once you turn Mac, you don’t turn back. Run, don’t Walk.
