Adventures in CPUing

Originally I had planned a blog about one of my favorite movie scenes today. Life, as usual, had other plans.

Rather than just describe the scene, I wanted to upload a clip of it. Since I now have a blog where uploading videos actually works, I figure I might as well use it. I popped over to Youtube to dig it up. Much to my surprise, Youtube did not have the clip. Okay, no problem. There was a scene in another movie I could write about. I went looking for that instead. I found something very promising, in fact it was the beginning of the scene that I was after, the beautiful build-up, and then the clip cut off right before the bit I wanted. Argh!

At this point I should have given up. I have to admit I am a very reluctant immigrant into the digital age. Though I was quite happy back in the days of the IIE when you had to program everything you wanted to do line by line in BASIC and fell in love with the Mac the first time I saw one, ever since the Windows era began I've been slightly distrustful of these big boxes on our desktops. I feel a bit like I was on the losing side of a war, and using Windows is about the equivalent of consorting with the enemy. I use Windows only because I must and refuse to get too friendly. Point being, I know very little about the ins and outs of computers these days. Really, I should have settled for just describing the scenes and leaving it at that.

But oh no, this is when the semi-perfectionist in me spoke up. The stickler, the stubborn Irish pride bristled at the mere thought of such a wimpy, half-hearted attempt. I felt my spine begin to steel as the lecture in my head began. When we do something we give it our best efforts, we do not turn tail and run at the first sign of difficulty. You no longer have any excuse to cringe away from the digital era. It is about time you sat yourself down and learned how to function. Aren't you always saying that anyone who operates a car should know as much as possible about how the car works, how to maintain it and how to fix it when something goes wrong? What exactly makes you think you are immune to the same principle when it comes to computers? "Push Button, Make Go" is a disgracefully lazy mentality. That is the way whole civilizations are lost. Now pull your act together and put that brain of yours to work. We have a problem, how are we going to solve it?

Well, I have the DVD of the movie I want the clip from. The challenge is to get that scene, and just that scene, on the computer and into a format where I can put it onto the blog. And how would we do that? Video editing software. Okay, look for video editing software.

This lead to a surprise. I have video editing software. Movie Maker 2.1 comes with XP's service Pack 2. (See how well I pay attention to what goes on in CPU land?) Sure enough a quick program search of my hard drive showed me right were it was.

Okay, so I had video editing software, now I just needed video to edit. This proved to be a little more tricky. I can't just pop the DVD in to my DVD drive and open it in Movie Maker. (Yes, I tried) I need a DVD ripper. That I don't just happen to already have on my computer; I have to go look for one. Come on, Google! Don't fail me now! I find one easily enough. Magic is the first program that comes up in the search. I have heard of Magic. More importantly, I have heard good things about Magic. Our resident computer god has given Magic his tentative approval in the past. I take that to mean Magic is probably not dangerous and may just do what I want it to do. I download Magic.

A few minutes later, I pop the DVD into the drive, pick a destination for the file and a format for the converted video. (I have no clue here, so I hedge my bets and go with WMV, probably a mistake, but I figure I can redo it if necessary)

I hit "start" and sit back to let Magic to it's well, magic. This is when I get my second, much less pleasant surprise. nothing else on my machine will work. Task Manger won't come up. Internet pages will not load. I cannot even minimize or move Magic's window. The program is working, but everything is frozen. No wonder. My CPU usage is at 100%. Ack!

Well, it's only for a few minutes. Oh wait, no, it's not; that doesn't say 5 minutes next to time remaining, it says 5 hours, nearly 6, actually. Great, so this thing wants to run my CPU at 100% capacity for nearly 6 hours. Just what will that do to my machine?

Somehow I don't think the results will be good. Thankfully, I only need the first 4 minutes of the movie. I let the converter run long enough to give me that much and stop it there. Now I edit.

It takes 6 minutes to load the video I've converted into Movie Maker. 7, 8, do I hear 9? Eventually the estimate starts going down instead of up and I wait for much more of the movie than I thought I had to load. Once it has, I begin editing. This turns out to be suspiciously easy. It takes less time to edit the video than it did to load the video into Movie Maker to edit. I am expecting any second now for St. Murphy to pop up and bite me. It goes much better than I expect doing anything on a Microsoft product to go, though. Saving it takes a really long time, but other than that it works fine. I have just successfully ripped and edited my first digital video!

So where is it? Sorry folks, you're going to have to tune in tomorrow to see it. I'm so sick of being at the computer at the moment I could scream.

Ms. Betty