Techno Babel
So here I am mindlessly copy video files (“media” in my world) from one hard drive to another.
Well, not mindlessly exactly. A lot of thinking went into it, but what a pain in the ass.
Basically I’ve been given media on a Mac drive – as it came from an editor that has a Mac system. Mine is of course a PC system. Not “of course” in the it-absolutely-must-have-to-be-PC sense of the word, but in the of-course-it-would-f***ing-be-the opposite-of-what-I-need-and-now-life-is-difficult sense of the word.
You can get a piece of software that allows a PC to read a Mac drive. It’s called Macdrive6, bizarrely enough.
But I also have media on a PC drive. And when I have them plugged in at the same time as the Mac drive, it malfunctions. So I can’t access video material from both drives simultaneously – which is a leetle bit of a problem if I need to use shots off both drives in the programme I’m editing.
And this is why I am laborious copying stuff I’ve selected off the Mac drive, first onto an internal drive, turning off the Mac drive, plugging in the PC drive, and then copying it onto that.
It’s a pain in the ass, I tell you!
But it did make me thing about languages. Well, watching hundreds of files being copied over, not once but twice, made me think a lot of things. One of them was about language.
In the film and television world, it’s become a minefield because of all the new formats. Everything speaks a different language and every company that produces technology seems to make a point of ensuring that communication between the platforms is as difficult as possible.
So there are issues between Sony and Panasonic. There are issues between Mac and PC. There are issues between editing software, where it’s FinalCutPro versus Avid. There’s a choice between working progressive or interlaced. And woe betide you if you end up with a project that contains a mixture of the two.
The formats you can shoot or deliver films on range from High Definition tapes, discs and cards – all of which require special players or readers – to Digibeta, DVcam and mini-DV tapes – again, which require special players. Not to mention DVD, because that really would get me going. Writing DVDs should be the easiest thing in the world, but It. Just. Is. Not.
Everything speaks a different language, requires some kind of special machinery that understands that particular language and connects in a different way to your edit platform.
There’s also a little something called a codec, which no one really understands, but makes life even more difficult.
And at the moment nothing much speaks to mine very easily.
I’m in a techno Tower of Babel.
