Codecs == fun!
This has been a mostly fun and warm weekend, occasionally peppered with shocking experiences of people judging others without a shred of empathy.
I went to a birthday party with people I haven’t seen in years, and it was a good thing, with catching up and the usual comedy.
I also went to a holiday gathering I try to make every year, and it was warm and full of laughter and good food, as always.
Yesterday I had the aforementioned downs, where I was appalled at the kind of statements people make as if they understand anything about where someone else is coming from. It’s precisely why I think outrage on an interpersonal scale is so dangerous – it usually requires a hell of a lot of presumption and is dangerously shy on facts. Rather than dwell on the one thing that can fill me with a deep and abiding anger (the abuse of my friends and family), though, I’d like to talk about my other frustration.
Codecs*.
See, if it weren’t for codecs (not to be confused with the hottie from The Guild, codex), my job as a video editor could almost be considered a normal creativity-based career. Instead, half the time I need to do something new, it is a chaotic mess with thirty tabs open and general pleading with my computer to allow SOMETHING to work right.
Like at work, I’m trying to set up for future high def videos, and saving in the format we need, which should be cake, is looking to be quite difficult in Final Cut Pro.
At home, I spent hours last night (almost the entire night) recovering the video capture I made of our guild doing its first boss kill in Icecrown Citadel (a big deal for us, trust me on this one).
This involved no less than four applications, attempts to re-screencap a video already screencapped and editing the files with a hex editor, comparing FUNCTIONING videos and copying code into the SCREWY one.
Ultimately it’s a little choppy and the first 4/5ths are gone, but damn it, I have the part that counts.
Now I just need to get Premiere to understand it so I can actually edit it.
*sigh*
* CODEC stands for COmpression/DECompression, and it is the standard by which a given video is saved. Multiple companies can create their version of the same codec. To make things more complicated, a given CODEC can live inside a number of wrappers – containers that tell applications how to work with them.
So Quicktime is a wrapper, and Flash is a wrapper, and Windows Movie is a wrapper. All of them can contain H.264 video, as that is the CODEC of the video. I expect 3 people out of my flist to have read this far, and each of them already knows goddamn well what a codec is. For those diligent readers I will mention that I am wearing my santa hat today, and it has kept my head warm, and had the security guard grinning as I drove in to work. Don’t tell those slackers who didn’t read this far!
In my limited run-ins with codecs, I have often thought that I would go crazy if I had to do anything with them on a regular basis. For that, and for not exploding all over the people who gifted you with a show of their ignorance, I applaud your amazing levels of patience!
I’m wearing mine today!