A Lesson in Flexibility

Well, it's nearing 1 a.m. here in our makeshift newsroom in the Harrisburg Hilton, and there's still plenty of work to be done.

I think I can speak for all of the interns when I say that one of the biggest lessons we've learned today is to be flexible. Gathering audio files, photos and video has been, for the most part, a breeze. The difficulty has been editing these files.

Exhibit A: Videos. We've been using digital cameras and Flip Video Camcorders to tape interviews and sessions. Most of us are working on computers running Windows, and are therefore using Movie Maker to edit and touch-up our work.

In order for a video to work in Movie Maker we need to convert them to .avi format. Gotcha. But, the cameras produce videos that are .mpg4 files. Problem. To solve this, we downloaded MPEG Streamclip.

So now, we have our videos edited to out liking in Movie Maker. The only way for us to export the project is to "publish" it, which outputs a .wmv format…problematic, yet again.

After downloading multiple converters only to fund out you really do have to pay for them or there will be a giant watermark in the middle of the video, I finally stumbled upon an online converter.

So, a one minute video took about 25 minutes or so to edit. Not bad. However, this 1 minute video took about three hours total to convert. The result? The same video I was looking at hours ago, a hard drive full of useless programs and a new appreciation for people who deal with this on a daily basis.

So, today's technological adventures reminded me to roll with the punches. Sometimes that assignment that "will be done before dinner, no problem," will, in all actuality, not be done until well after midnight. Though it may be frustrating to fight with technology, the website survived the delay just fine, and we're better prepared for tomorrow's projects.

Mission accomplished.