Semanal #4 - Wood Slick

E A SENSITIVE CONSTITUTION.

Recently, you may have seen me go a little bit crazy on Twitter about the wood slick that washed up along the Sussex (and further) coastline. In Worthing, they had piles of the stuff, much higher than your head, but here in Brighton we had less of it. I went down to the beach the day after it made the news (but about a week after the ship, the Ice Prince, went down off Portland Bill - treacherous waters!). I was all fired up from being made to go out onto the street to do 'market research' in my Women in Social Enterprise course - I wanted to talk to people. So I did. I talked to lots of people and got some lovely footage, but unfortunately, because my computer's such a dumb-fuck piece of machinery, I couldn't post it... it was too big and I can't compress. So, this is what you get for now.

My problems are these. I can't use Moviemaker to compress because it won't accept the MP4s that my Xacti produces. If I use a codec to change them to AVIs then it used to partially load them and then crash. Now it tells me I am missing a codec needed to put them in at all. I also have Adobe Premier. It doesn't recognise my camera (possibly because I am not using a firewire), so I have been trying to import footage rather than capture it. I can import it, but I lose the sound. I have no idea why.

This has been an insurmountable headfuck for me for months. So much so that I would try to sort it out and it would defeat me, and I would retreat with my tail between my legs, vowing never to videoblog again. I haven't edited anything properly (i.e. not in camera) since about October. There's loads that I want to do, but I just can't do it at the moment. The computer has been winning up until tonight when I finally decided that the bastard thing would not beat me.

Thus, I have decided to do the unthinkable and install Ubuntu. This is, for me, a rash decision. I am not techy. I am what you might call the Man in the Street. I don't know what a command line is, though I understand that I am going to have to understand what this is. I might melt my computer and my mind by doing this, but both are essentially fried anyway, so it can't get that much worse. I like that there are forums where people want to help you and where they have a specific bit for absolute beginners. I like that it's free and open. Windows, frankly, can go screw itself... well it can in a week or so maybe, when I've saved all my data (have to organise time to do this around jiving, running and pond building). Fuck, I hope this works.Beth Tilston's videoblogshow less...