Clueless . . . .the sequel?

So I usually spend my Sunday afternoons editing the videos I made earlier in the week.  This Sunday was particularly dreadful.  My epic failures from the last video continued into this one.  I don't know why because they were filmed in different days.

I only have myself to blame though.  I really screwed up in the game and instead of letting my audio run while I went online to figure out what to do to fix things, I stopped the audio and then restarted when I was ready to play again.  Unfortunately I had to do that more than once.  I ended up with 3 audio files for one video.  Getting those to sync up and edit was a pain in the butt.

After all was said and done and while I waited for my video to upload to YouTube, I called my brother dain bramage.  I had some questions to ask about external hard drives and such.  I mentioned my editing nightmare and he asked why didn't I just sync up all the audio initially and then render the file into one file (my audio and video are separate files now with the way I have to do things) and then edit that.  I wouldn't have had to edit the video and audio files separately and then have to constantly have to check that things were synced up.

Pow!

It's such a simple thing.  But it blew my mind.  Why didn't I think of that?  I'm the one playing around with the editing software so I should have been able to figure that out.  Or at least make a guess that something like that would work.  But no.  I was so set in the painful way that I've been editing that I couldn't think outside the box to make it better.  What took almost 3 hours to do could have been done in less than an hour.  Mind blown.

The main reason I wanted to talk to my brother was to ask if it was okay to use an old external hard drive that I had been using for my old Windows XP machine that is now completely worthless.  I had a bunch of stupid questions to ask because I'm not a computer geek like he is, but he helped me figure things out and told e how to reformat the drive once I've taken off all vital information that I want to keep.

I also had to ask him how to get all my writing that I've stored on little floppy disks on to my laptop so that I could keep them and possibly work on them.  We talked about the size of floppy disks and he said they were only 1.44mb in size. 

Pow!

That's all?  I remember when floppy disks came out (I'm dating myself here) and I can't believe that that was only how big they were.  So I asked him who big a CD had for storage.  He said only about 700mbs.  What?  Really?

Pow!

I then tried to do the math in my head on how many floppy disks you could store on a CD.  Or how many floppy disks you could store in 1 gigabit of space.

Pow! and Pow!

I was thinking I would need a lot of space to store all the short stories I've written over the years because I have a lot of 3.5 floppy disks but it's actually not that much.  I was thinking that I would need at least an 8gb thumb drive but I think I could get away with a 2gb drive and have room to spare.  I thought I had a lot of writing but when you put it in that perspective, I really don't.

Pow!

I hate it when I don't know something because I hate looking like a fool.  Tonight I looked like a BIG fool.  And with simple things too boot.  Maybe I'm too focused on other things that I don't really pay attention to other things.  I mean, nothing I learned tonight is earth shattering.  I don't just learn of a cure for cancer or how to stop hunger in Africa, but it was still weird to have my eyes opened to such simple things that I was unaware about before.

I wonder what other things people know that will blow my mind.  It seems my can be so easily blew, but I wouldn't think of myself as naïve.  Clueless maybe, but not naïve.  Maybe my life can be a sequel to that movie.  A good preview of my cluelessness can be found in my latest video.  Check it out.

Failures, trails and space recovery

I haven’t been idle since my last post.  In fact I’ve been very busy.  I’m desperately trying to figure out why I’m having so many problems with the audio on my game captures.  I’ve recorded several videos and they’ve all failed in one way or another.  If not with the audio, than with the video.  I told you.  I don’t know what I’m doing. 

I messed with some things earlier today and captured another video but I haven’t watched it yet to see how things turned out.  I’m starting to wonder if I’m going to end up with a usable video before the end of the week.  My “one video a week” goal might be hard to get this week.  I think I might have to get my baby brother kaiakapero over to help me figure it out.  He got his degree in the technical side of broadcasting and that’s what he does for a living.  I’ve almost ran out of options and tapped out everything I know on how to fix things.  But at least I’m learning about stuff I never knew about.

But since I need to figure out what’s going on, I’ve been playing a bunch of different games for all these test sessions.  I didn’t want to keep playing Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga because I just might end up finishing the game before I figure out what I’m doing.  So I’ve picked other games that I can just mess around in.

One of the things I did to try and test things was open up some trail games that I have on my hard drive and play them.  I’ve played them once before and thought “I might want to buy this” but didn’t do so at the time because I didn’t have the money.  Those games have just been sitting on my hard drive taking up space and I still haven’t bought them yet.  So I decided to give them another go and see if I still like them.  If I did I would keep it and hopefully buy it the next time I have some extra money.  If not, I would delete the game and free up some badly needed space on my hard drive.

I think I played 3 of them.  And deleted them all.  That’s not to say they were bad games, just that I wasn’t as interested in playing them now as I was when I first downloaded the trial version.  Unfortunately none of those test videos were usable for my YouTube channel.  But the good news is that I did some more cleaning up of my hard drive and got back up to 30GB of free space.  I was down to 5GB before I started.  Damn you Games with Gold!

For some reason I seem to think that there is a limit on how large an external drive you can connect to your Xbox360; whether it be a thumb drive or something else.  I want to say the limit is 32GB, but I could be wrong.  Also, I think I heard/read somewhere that there is going to be an update soon to Xbox that will allow for larger external hard drives to be connected to an Xbox360.  I don’t remember where or when I heard/read that so I could be way off with that.  Maybe I dreamed about it.  Who knew that 500GBs (or whatever the slims are) wouldn’t be enough space for someone’s games.  I wonder how long it will take me to max out my hard drive on an Xbox One after I get one.