Sometimes I hate technology, I guess most people do, but I have to work with it all day every day and sometimes it is just so difficult for no good reason. I guess that's why I sympathise with our client base. It seems that true understanding of technology is about knowing that even though it should be really simple to do something it often isn't. Why? Because of stupid manufacturers who pretend to follow standards but don't or because of silly standards.
Take yesterday. I'm trying to make some short (30 sec) films demonstrating video conferencing. We have a VC device and a device that records VC streams. So sit in front of camera, connect VC device to recorder, hit record and recite a poem. Stop recording at end. Yep that all works wonderfully - all the recordings play back to my VC device.
Download recordings to Mac. Yep. Import into FCP4. No. Well sort of no. I have pictures but no sound because mpeg 1 uses a muxed format.
Quicktime pro! Err no. Both Macs have been upgraded to V7 of Quicktime and my pro licenses don't work. OK QT6 Pro on PC. Nope. Won't extract the audio.
Having tried & failed to get JACK to connect QT out to Audacity in I'm on th epoint of connecting line out to line in and doing it that way when I discover a program called Streamclip which will convert mpeg1 to a DV stream with the audio! More than Final Cut Pro can manage.
This works fine for all the files but one - it seems that the VC recorder has screwed up the file (it says it's 7 hours long). Hmmm - how do I get the audio? Another freeware app to the rescue mpgtx.
Lessons? Well there are lots of other free/shareware apps out there that can probably do this, you just have to find them. But why oh why, if Joe Bloggs can write an app to do this in his free time, can't a professional editing package like FCP just do it? If it takes a pro like me a day to do such a simple job how does an ordinary person fare? I had similar issues when trying to import video into my sequencer to record a voiceover so this isn't an isolated incidence.
Standards are there for a reason, but they have to be followed and they have to be pruned occasionally. Most of all they have to be implemented and that implementation should be seemless.
Until then it will be curses all round.
