The Dangers of My Love for Technology

OK. So I'm noticing this trend in my passion for technology. I noticed it today as I irritatedly tried to get video feed transferred from my camera to something!!! See, my dad gave me this really great video camera about four years ago. Stephen and I were going to Mexico, and so of course we needed it. It was an early generation DVR camera--really cool at the time. When I got my computer I thought it would be a piece of cake to transfer video footage to make DVD's. Transferring was easy, but there was no way to burn DVD's with the software I had pre-installed.

So I finally purchased Adobe Photoshop and Premiere. I LOVED Photoshop, but to my irritation, Premiere would not work with my CPU processor. About a year ago, I got a new computer, which I made SURE I could use Premiere on. Premiere loaded and worked fine, but my stupid camera--only accepts a USB 1 cord or Firewire, and of course my new computer has only USB jacks and Premiere only accepts USB 2 feed. I could use Premiere to make really great photo slide shows, but no video footage. Aaaarrrrgggghhh! Do you see where this is going?

Now about Christmas time, we were given money for the family. Our DVD player had been acting up, so finally! I had the solution! I would buy a DVD-R, so I could transfer video to a disk, then load the disk to my computer and Premiere. With Josh having been in this play, I finally had a real motivation to get it working, so we rushed home Friday night to play the video on our TV. But the cord that is supposed to transfer video from the camera to the other thingy you want to play it on? USB of course . . . which my TV and DVD-R have no receptor for, and my computer won't accept because it's USB 1!!!! (I'm feeling like and Abbot and Costello routine right now.)

There was one hope. My camera had Four output holes--USB, S-video, Firewire, and a little round yellow hole. The little round hole was my last hope, so I stopped at Radio Shack today to see if I could get a cord that worked. Mr. Knows-Everything-About-Electronics at Radio Shack looked at me like I was mentally challenged and handed me the correct TWENTY-FIVE DOLLAR cord. But hey! At this point I have about a fortune invested in being able to make these videos, so what's another 25 bucks? I drove home with images in my head of what I would do with that cord if I got home and it didn't work either (they did involve Mr. Knows-Everything). Got home . . . plugged in the cord to my camera . . . plugged the cord into my TV set . . . and . . . we have video! And sound!

I spent Mother's Day copying an hour and a half of video to a DVD, transferring it to my computer, importing it to Premiere, and editing video to my heart's content.

I think it would have been cheaper and easier to just buy a new camera. And oh yeah, Photoshop and Premiere now have a newer version out . . . and they do more stuff. Bet they don't take video footage from my cool little Radio Shack cord.