Macintosh And Gizmo

I could essentially sum up this entire blog entry in a single sentence.

I hate Macs.

No, let me fix that. I FUCKING hate Macs.

There are hundreds of reasons to hate Macintosh, including the fact that they are nothing but the attention starved little brother to the PC that try so hard to be just as cool as him. But my reason is a little more personal.

As part of what I am calling Operation Clean Sweep, which is an attempted to reorganize my life through both physical cleaning and reorganization of my personal effects, I am trying to turn dozens of Beta and DVCPro tapes into neatly organized DVDs.

So first I put all my Beta stuff on DVCPro. I lucked out as FOX still had a BetaSP deck. SP is quickly becoming extinct, so I am glad I did this while I could! Then came the more difficult task of digitizing the DVCPro tapes and putting the stories on DVD in a file format I could upload or otherwise share.

Here is where Mac comes in. It seemed like a pretty simple task. I would ingest my video into Final Cut Pro, then export it as a file. Rich, our news engineer, who is a Mac nut himself, explained it as a simple 4 step process. I decided tonight after my shift would be the perfect time.

Once the show was over I moved into Edit Bay One with my box of tapes, my freshly purchased DVD-R's, and the desire to complete this as quickly as possible. The problems began as soon as I sat down.

No, I didn't break the chair, but what I did notice - or more accurately fail to notice - was that this tower didn't have a DVD drive. Of course that is impossible because how else would you install the software? I looked all over and noticed a could of sliding doors. I managed to pry one open and see that there was indeed a disc drive behind it.

But there was NO FUCKING BUTTON to open it! I checked all the menus. There was eject, but it was shaded - probably because the drive was empty. I searched and searched. Apples version of My Computer, ironically called 'Finder', didn't even acknowledge that a DVD drive existed. Finally, after about 15 minutes, I declared that the Mac had won, and left Edit Bay One dejected and pissed.

Now I am sure some MacAssHat will tell me that it's simple to open the drive. Fuck you. If it were simple there would be a fucking button on the front that says EJECT on it. My computer has two drives, both of which have buttons on the front of the drive that open the tray regardless of whether or not there is a disc inside.

I wasn't entirely defeated though! I grabbed the keys to our live truck that has a Macbook in it and darted outside. I powered everything on and noticed that there did not seem to be a drive on this one either! WHAT THE FUCK??!! However, I did find it, camouflaged in the front of it. Just a little slit. Like a Mac vagina, kind. I inserted the disc and smiled. The Mac, much like my PC, asked me what I wanted to do with the blank DVD. Well, I had a lot of work ahead of me, so I told it to ignore it for now.

Big mistake.

An hour and a half pass as I ingest all my video into FCP. I take my first video file and set my in and out point and then go to export. Lots of options, most of which included words I don't even think were English. But Rich had told me to do Quicktime, since that would ensure comptability. So I chose that and waited the 2 minutes for it to write the file. I then of course checked to see if it was in my 'burn folder'. It was.

It was 2.8 mother freakin' gigabytes!

Jesus Christ on a fucking pogo stick. That was a 1:47 package. I wouldn't even be able to put another package on the disc!! Screw that! So I messed around and found that FCP won't let you export as anything else unless you use a program called 'Compressor'. So I did and despite the fact I was unable to export to an AVI (I chose MP4), I managed to get some stuff ready to burn.

Here's the fun part. I click on the seemingly to convenient 'Burn' button on the folder. It told me I need to insert a blank DVD. I told it I did, very loudly, probably confusing the drug dealers and hookers in the motel parking lot across the street, but it insisted that I hadn't. Fine, I conceded. I will just eject the disc and reinsert it.

Macbook was having none of that and refused to acknowledge there was even a disc in the drive. Every DVD related program refused to let me eject. Even the DVD Player, which had an eject button, beeped defiantly at me every time I clicked it. And of course, since some fucking Einstein decided not to install an eject button on the front of the drive, my disc was trapped.

At that point I told the Mac exactly what I thought of it, it's bigger sibling in Edit Bay One and that fucking douchebag on the commercial, and deleted my files (after I took 5 minutes using 'Finder' to find them). I then left as if I were to stay I am sure I would have destroyed it and would have certainly been fired and left with a $2,000 bill to replace that piece of shit.

So in the end, I still have a box of DVCPro tapes to move to DVD and no way to do that. Quite frankly I think I would rather go out and rent a DVCPro deck and do it at home than ever deal with a Macintosh again. And be warned. The first person to tell me that Macs are better than PCs... I will hunt you down and punch you so hard in your cock...

I had considered buying a Macbook as my next computer, but not now. I will deal with the viruses and the crashes in exchange for simplicity and the ability to customize. And eject buttons. Whoever thought that there shouldn't be eject buttons... I hope you get AIDS.

But Erin, STFU and tell us about Gizmo! Okay. When I announced to my friends in Vegas that I was leaving the bright lights, glamour and crime of Las Vegas for Tulsa, I was taunted and told that I would now be stuck covering 'cats in trees'. I of course laughed that off. No station covers cats in trees!

My first day I was sent with our Solving Problems photo John to the following story.

I didn't shoot any, I was just there to watch and learn. I may have mentioned this before. But now you can see the video, courtesy of b-roll.net TV.