I’m busy recording another section of my book ‘The Beholden’. When I’ve finished all the recording, the project will have an audiobook and a videobook, as well as a Kindle and paperback available for purchase.
That is the good news. In order to create my best work, I have to convey my written words to people who cannot see, or just prefer to listen to the written word. This is not a new thing for me to do, for twenty-five years I held many positions in a charity for the visually impaired, including that of being the Producer as well as contributor of audio newstapes, cd’s, minidiscs and programmes designed purely to entertain. If you like, I produced the equivalent of radio programmes.
So… I’m no stranger to working with audio!
Today everything went well… Isn’t that the very phrase that is spoken just before everything goes t*ts up? Well today was no exception to the t*ts up rule!
Apart from a couple of interruptions, one from a wailing pussycat, who wanted to know why her servant was not lavishing attention upon her, everything went well, until it came to the editing…
That’s when I rediscovered that when everything’s going so well, it’s because something is about to go badly wrong…
I loaded the audio-visual file, I had spent three hours producing, into Movie Studio 16. The plan being to look through the footage and take out any long gaps or audio blips that may be there and render it ready for an intensive edit on Sunday, Saturday is sports day…
Well! I pressed the play button just to listen to, and see, the quality of the audio and video, which is when I found I had a problem!
The video just sat and looked at me as I looked back at it, nothing moved… Nope, there was going to be no cooperation today.
I eventually gave up and went back to the original file (unedited) which played, with no problem, in the computer playback programme and looked very good. So… I decided to abandon Movie Studio and migrate the file to Adobe Premiere.
I went through the same procedure, loaded the file, which looked good, then poised my finger over the Play button. I confess to a certain amount of trepidation, then pressed the play button!
Nothing! The video looked at me and I looked back, not a quiver from the video, I think it was me on the verge of quivering…
Three hours I had spent, and another hour and a half trying to figure out what was wrong, and all the blo**y video did was stare at me!
Then the cat wailed at me from outside the door…
Thank God for noisy pussycats!
I shut the programme down and switched the computer off, then opened the door. Willow gave an indignant wail, launched herself into my arms, then started to purr…
Oh well… Sunday’s another day…
Kenneth J. Matthews 