Man, did I get behind! My apologies to the two or three people that read my blog (as if it were that many) for not posting yesterday or the day before. I got really busy. Very unusual for me, since my job is *so* demanding (is using asterisks to indicate sarcasm acceptable?). Anyway, The video stuff is looking good--I was able to synch up the audio from the one DVD to the video from the other. I've tried to synch stuff up before without much success, but it all depends on the medium that the audio was captured on. CD's tend to be slightly faster, even though they are 'real time' (or maybe DVD's are slightly slower? Not sure). Anyway, these were both DVD's, so it's okay. It worked out. Meantime, three day week-end coming up. We're going to be doing 'spring cleaning' at the church. This also includes touching up the paint, deep-cleaning carpets, etc. Not looking forward to the work, but I am looking forward to how much better the building is going to look.
By the way, it occurs to me that the Ford Motor Company should make a car called the "Prefect" with terry-cloth upholstery, so that the driver of a Ford Prefect would always have a towel handy. Just a thought.

What a week-end--and what a week it's going to be!

I am back, after a good week-end. I wish I had gotten more sleep, but that's a pretty normal Monday morning feeling. In some ways it's good to be back at work. MY work 'to-do' list is much shorter than my home 'to-do' list, and, once again, I got a lot less done over the week-end than I thought I would. I also came to realize that there is a lot more that I need to do.
We have been videotaping our Sunday morning services for about 17 years now. About a year and a half ago we moved up to DVD. Even more recently we got two stand-alone DVD burners. So, I hooked the two burners in-line with the two cameras, to get back-up footage. This way, if we need to edit the video of Sunday morning service, we have the video from both cameras available. It seemed to work fairly well on the 6th, the first Sunday we tried it (fairly well meaning that we got no audio on one DVD--which is okay, because we really wanted the video--and only three minutes of video on the other--we got all the audio {turns out the video connector came loose--replaced the connector during the week}). Now the pastor wants to put everything on DVD, which makes sense, it takes up a lot less space. So Saturday I went in and hooked up the two stand-alone DVD burners to VHS decks, and dug out some VHS tapes from 1990 (might as well start at the beginning, right?), and started duping them. For some reason, on the first pass, we got no video on one of the DVD's. On the second pass, we got no video on the other one. Apparently, in trying to correct the problem from the first pass, I created a new problem. So then, I said, forget it, let's hook these back up for Sunday morning. So, after a considerable amount of time finagling with wiring, I thought I had everything hooked up right. Unfortunately, something went way wrong, because the master capture device (which I did not mess with on Saturday) got no audio, and the other two got no video. At all. I am now hoping that the audio from one of the two video-less DVD's will synch up well with the video from the audio-less DVD, so that we will at least be able to create one good 'master.' If not, we also taped the service, using an S-VHS deck, so hopefully we can recapture...
In any case, we have too many cables spread out over too much acreage and I need to sit down this week and label and organize cables. I am not looking forward to it, but it has to be done. I can't keep messing up DVD's like this.
I think this is my longest post yet...