D15c0v3r3d L05T

The Wheadon family converted to digital photography in 1999 with an Olympus D600L and a Canon BJC 5000 Photo Printer. A couple years later we put the Sony Handicam to it’s grave and got a JVC Digital camcorder. As a budding digital hobbyist I built and upgraded computers through the years to handle my growing career in programming as well to store and work with our digital home media. For photography ventures my various laptop and desktop computers were quite sufficient to manipulate and print. Digital video conversion was a different story. Video production is very resource intensive. I never really had the patience to capture and render video with USB 1.1 and < 1Ghz processors. The digital tapes got played straight from our camcorder and media just stacked up awaiting some future time when tape would get converted to DVD.

In 2007 I finally built a computer that could handle the stress. My shiny new clone computer was a dual core Intel Processor with 4GB of RAM, a 512MB ATI Radeon Vid card, 100GB of open disk space on my primary HDD, 250GB of open disk space on a slave drive, and a Pinnacle video capture card. The computer sat for a year waiting for me to capture the huge stack of videos and one fateful saturday I bit the bullet. Like a good little worker bee I buried myself in the basement office for a video capture festival. I was happily capturing video and saving to a media disk on my hot rod Windows XP Pro PC. After six hours of capturing video and pulling them into “projects” I began to port the AVI captures into DVD media. I produced three projects and burned three dvd disks with no issues. I should say, no issues that I immediately knew of.

The trouble began when I hooked up a usb backup drive and discovered all of my AVI files were gone! I then tried to play back the DVD videos and discovered they were empty. Although frustrated, I figured I had done something wrong and began the track of troubleshooting. What I discovered is that the capture worked fine and generated files on my hard disk, but if I quit Pinnacle (to back them up) or attempted to burn a project to DVD the files would be deleted from disk. Salt was added to my wounds when I could not get good copies of the AVI files before Pinnacle deleted them because of the beauty in Windows that IS file locking. At this point I needed to find a way to capture and burn my videos and had around 500 bucks wrapped up in my hardware and software investment for producing digital media. I knew my Pinnacle software was up to date with patches, but when I attempted to get support the customer service rep told me “you’re software is very old and we don’t support it any longer.” My only “option” was to do a 99 dollar upgrade to the latest version.

I bought Pinnacle’s newer (supported) software and was told by the customer service rep that I really should uninstall the previous version since I was having problems. Evidently the uninstall would ensure that any bad libraries would not be kept and thus pollute a new install. I completed an amazing list of removal steps that involved running the uninstaller, manually deleting some files the uninstaller didn’t remove, and then actually entering regedit to delete some Pinnacle keys. Once my PC was “clean” of any previous Pinnacle Studio install I was able to do a fresh install of the new software. Upon launch I became quite impressed at the many steps Pinnacle had gone through to make sure I wasn’t installing pirated software and after 10 or 15 minutes the software was unlocked and functioning. Priority number one was to do a capture and I set right to the task. After the video was captured I verified an AVI on the file system and quit Pinnacle to make my backup of the file. The file vanished! Back on the line with Pinnacle we went over my computer configuration and all was fine until I read the part number for my capture card… “that is a very old capture card” the person said, “we don’t support that card any more.” Amazingly it didn’t matter to the rep that the capture was successful and the failure happened on my HDD with the Pinnacle software, “you will need to buy a new capture card.” Resolving not to shoot the duck I thanked the person for their help and ended my help desk call. With 500 dollars invested and no meaningful support to show for it I shrugged and powered down the computer I had created for the sole purpose of capturing my home videos. I’m not terribly patient with nagging computer problems and my video mastering episode taxed every bit of patience I had. I gave up.

I completely formatted and reinstalled Windows and got the exact same problems on my new build. At the end of this road and fast forward two years I got a MacBook Pro and was able to capture/render projects in iMovie immediately with no problems. Yet another win for Apple and loss for Windows via a high profile vendor. Pinnacle didn’t refund my upgrade money, my OEM Windows software was without support, and my personal ethics wouldn’t allow me to return the 2 year old capture card and software to Costco. (Even though they probably would have taken it back.) The star powerhouse I created for digital media mastering became good for nothing but SecondLife and MP3s. I shut down my PC and as the monitor darkened I unplugged my CPU vowing to never power it up again running Windows.

Don’t get me wrong because I fully recognize Microsoft Windows as a viable operating system. Only after a long love/hate relationship did I chose to go a different way or two. There is no panacea for us in the computer world… but there are choices. I spend most of my time on a Mac now.