Backlogged

As Nana pointed out, I haven't posted for a wee bit.

Part was being busy (at both work and play). The rest was technical difficulties.

A couple weeks ago, any video I pulled from my phone had it's colors distorted on my laptop.

It annoyed the crap out of me.



I spent over an hour going through footage and parsing together the Monkey Joe video. It looked fine at first, but when I went to publish it it looked awry. "Something's wrong with the colors," Carrie said. "I can't watch it. It hurts my eyes."

At first, I figured it was an isolated incident. I had started the project in Windows Live Movie Maker and slowly whittled down footage over a week in small increments. Perhaps something went wrong because I was opening and shutting the laptop with the project open?

Then the colors were distorted in what will probably be my favorite piece of embarrassing toddler footage to blackmail an older Shane with.

This further annoyed me.

I started trying to debug my machine. First, I noticed fiddling with video setting in Windows Media player fixed diddly squat. Next, I found Real Player, and QuickTime did not saturate any colors. I surmised the problem was with Windows Media player. It had worked well previously before quirking out, and there had been no large updates or changes before it quirked out. Windows 7 forced me to go through a convoluted process to uninstall and re-install a 'fresh' copy, but nothing changed.

Being busy, this process took a while. Thursday, I decided to run some basic tests with the footage I got from Shane's Halloween parade at day-care.

Video 1 - Uploaded directly from my phone (to ensure there were no errors in the original)

Result: No problems detected.

Video 2 - Uploaded directly from my computer without any modification (to see if the copy was damaged)

Result: Video 2 did display the saturated colors when opened on the computer, but not on YouTube.

Video 3 - I trimmed the clip down in Windows Live Movie Maker like I normally would.

Result: Wonky colors.

I need to either update my codecs and fiddle with the Live Movie Maker or download and learn a new program to fiddle with. I'll try to resolve the issue quickly. It irks me to spend time editing clips when I know the final output will be damaged, so I haven't been doing it. Enough of a backlog has built up and now I'm motivated to fix things and start catching up!

It all takes time and energy, though. Two things any working parent of a toddler knows are in short supply! This should be a good week to buckle down and fix it.