Michelle's Visit

Blank videos and a ludicrous theory.

Today was the day Michelle was supposed to come to my house to export the video she was doing for her gym. She was coming to my room to use my pc. So being the impressionist that I am, I quickly got up early and sought to the task of making my room more hospitable.

The doorbell rang just as I was about to taste my food. I quickly opened the door to let her in. In Indian customs it’s bad to keep anyone waiting outside your doorstep. Though I do not believe half the crap my Indians fore fathers had said I do believe in doing the right thing because I always put myself in other people’s shoes. How would you feel if you rang someone’s doorbell and just stand there for someone to finally open the door. It’s not a very pleasant experience.

What strikes me the most was that she bought drinks again. Sasi and Coke. She knows that Sasi is my favourite drink.

Anyway there she stood looking at me as I spoke gibberishly. Sometimes I just don’t know what I am saying. It’s like my brain is telling me one thing, and the mouth is says another thing.

I ate my food as quickly as possible and invited her to my room to use my pc. She was nice enough to say hello to my grannies and even had a small chat with me ma.

My mother offered her Indian sweets and a glass of coke. And it’s not the one she bought incidentally, I went to shop before she arrived and bought 2 bottles of coke. Later she was treated to a homemade pizza my mother had made for us.

Soon she got down to work. I offered my help. But I soon realized that I was getting in the way, so I gentlemanly offered my pc for her to use. Although she did say I looked pretty bored, I was actually day dreaming.

When she took out a cd album if that’s what you call it, I was amazed at her organization. No wonder I picked her to be my producer. She knows how to organize her things. Well organizing was never my strength; it was more evident when I was rendering multiple files for my animation Akiro. My naming convention made no sense what so ever that I spent more time finding the right files than editing the final video.

While she copied her files over, I showed off several of my games I had. We even poked fun at Spiderman 2’s animations. We played a head to head race in need for speed underground. But the game that impressed her was Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.

After converting all the files, we proceed to export the video. But as fate would have it, the video turn out to be blank as it did in her com. My first impression was that the codecs were not installed. But I soon realized that the codecs were indeed working because we could view the file with the media player. And I checked it out with my codec finder software.

As it was getting late, I told her or was it a promise, never mind that, that I would figure it out for her. After she left, I began scouring the net for any information concerning the matter. I searched the many forums for an answer but to no avail. When I actually found something or real value the explanation was vague at its best.

So I put my thinking cap on, I managed to decipher the problem by eliminating possibilities; I soon arrived at a reasonable conclusion. The source file was viewable but corrupted during the export process. So I decided to try to convert them into mpeg to and reinsert them into the Adobe premiere.

The idea was just crazy enough for it to work. But first I need to find software to convert the videos. After a brief downloading session I soon got down to work. Although the software did its job, it was rather slow in converting the file. I later found a more reliable and effective converter.

I performed a test and would you believe it, my method worked actually worked. Only downside was the quality suffered a slight loss. I managed to bring a 451mb avi file to at mere 81mb mpeg file. So I spent the whole night until 4am converting all her files.

Although we chatted at late at night, she apologized many times for making me do her stuff and she felt guilty. I told her it was nothing and I would gladly do it for her. She has helped me so many times that I am glad to have had the opportunity to help her.

I remember the time she helped arrange a recording session with one of our lecturer’s band. She was not even in my group. But she took the initiative to help me. Those moments will not go unappreciated by me. Overall it was a very fun day; I am sure going to miss these moments when I enlist for national service.

Somehow I just know National Service isn’t going to be any fun.