Tuesday, August 22, 2023

One thing leads to another

I've been sewing a little bit, but lots of hours work isn't making much of a change. So if you're looking for lots of updates--- they aren't happening.

In other news, one of the latest videos we took with the GoPro camera took 14 hours to convert 1 hour of raw footage into something we could post on the web. After several days of leaving the program running overnight, we started looking at ways to speed up the process. One of the first requirements was a more robust CPU, then it also needed a lot more RAM and of course a much bigger and better graphic card and...

If you know anything about computers, you know that this is a recipe for not just an overhaul, but a complete new computer system. So we went shopping. We went from an old quad core computer to a 16 core, 24 thread PC Intel 13th gen Core i7 with 32 GB RAM, 2TB SSD and a RTX  4070 graphic card for about twice what we intended to spend. The up side is - conversion of the same files with the same parameters went from 14 hours to 3. Yay! I think...

Having sorted out that little problem, hubby decided he was tired of filming quiet trails and looked for something different. He thought filming the stores in our local plaza would be an interesting change. So we went up the road and began riding along the fronts of the stores. Not knowing if the camera mounted on the handlebars was getting a good picture or cutting off the store names, he tried to face the stores head on. Repeatedly pulling away from the curb and turning toward the store fronts.

Did I mention this operation was done on a Friday evening when everybody and his brother was jammed into the parking lot?  Did I mention that the plaza in question is formed as a square within a square, so that you are consistently pulling out into traffic? Did I mention that I'm not fond of driving a scooter in traffic? Every one of those cars is bigger than me and I've already been hit with a car once this summer.

After an hour of dodging cars we came home and looked at the replay, only to discover that that camera hadn't been turned on!!!

You know what that means, don't you? Yep, we had to do it all over again. Only this time I insisted that we do it in the morning on a weekday when there was little or no traffic. Know what we got? An hour of driving around a parking lot. You can see the store fronts, and the cars and asphalt. You get an idea of the size of the plaza and the stores in it, oh and cars and asphalt. For variety there's cars and asphalt.

So much more interesting than trees and flowers and water. Right?

Sorry, no pictures as I find parking lots full of cars and asphalt less interesting than a blank page.

2 comments:

Jane McLellan said...

Er yes, I’d rather see nature pictures than a parking lot too. At least you could process the parking lot ones quicker!

Lavinia said...

I'm also dabbling in video editing myself and can understand the grief you had with your old computer. The new one will hopefully be good for a good many years.
I'd also prefer nature to a city scape. Especially since most of us only see cars and asphalt most of the time anyway.