New category: Production Diary.
These will be notes, sometimes a bit rambling and raw, often including tech stuff that may make little sense to ZC regulars and be of even less interest, but… you never know. You never know what someone might find interesting. You never know what clues you might pick up from something. You never know who might surf by, someone searching for info on some computer conundrum – self-educating, guessing, finally hitting something useful. Maybe it squares just well enough with ambiguous remarks in a review of an earlier or later version of a thing you use with the thing, or don’t, depending on whether you have the other thing and are trying to do x as well as the y or the z that might have been the real focus of another piece you read at a vendor’s blog that was at least up-to-date compared to the gamer’s forum in 2006 where on the other hand they went into a lot more detail…
I’ve discovered that some of the biggest names in user-friendly multimedia applications – Apple, Sony – neglect to mention that, even after you’ve done what you’ve figured out they want want you to do, a show-stopping error message won’t go away until after a re-boot. What this means practically is that even after you’ve solved the problem, you may not know it, may find yourself going back over your work, downloading again, checking again, getting more frustrated.
I think it’s because up until relatively recently, new applications and updates often didn’t take full effect until after a re-start anyway – so it was a given, didn’t even need to be mentioned. With the latest version of Apple Quicktime – they’re up to version 7.69.xx.x – and Windows 7, as with many other programs – like those continually updating Adobe Flash and Java apps – that’s no longer necessary. Mostly. (Nor do the installer programs seem anymore to advise you to close other programs before proceeding – that used to be near-universal on Windows installers, though not always actually necessary.)
S0, when trying to figure out why the “missing authoring components” error message on Sony Vegas Pro Movie Studio 10 didn’t go away after a fresh Quicktime install, I didn’t even think of trying a re-start – something that back in ancient Windows ages my forefathers, or fore-me’s, would have had at the top of their/my/our lists of things to try when running into unexpected difficulties, and which anyway would have been part of the normal installation routine. Instead, I went searching for info on “Quicktime authoring components” – ran into the usual sloppy language on whatever that might actually mean, and began to get the idea I might need to invest somewhere between $20 and $500 on new stuff just so I could load Quicktime Video (*.MOV) files into the film editing software, something I may or may not actually be doing much of, but which was going quite smoothly on another system.
Then I ran across a forum where some guy asked for help with this problem… didn’t get any… then returned some time later, virtually facepalming, reporting that a re-start did the trick, fixed the error. So, maybe some other webnaught will run across this post on a similar search…
“You never know” (or, very literally, “yes, one can never know”) was the Dadaist Kurt Schwitters’ epitaph: Man kann ja nie wissen. That’s his gravestone up there, or, as some believe, his re-start dialogue box.
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You never know.
When I was writing at Universal, the tech guys there had to deal with our horribly outdated computers. I learned from them that the thing that fixes the most problems most consistently is to restart. And restarting is spiritual. If you can’t quit what you’re doing as a spiritualist and start over, you’re not really practicing spirituality. This becomes most painfully obvious with long time practitioners who have had to put a tremendous amount of time in with spiritual study. It’s hard for them to recognize that the study itself is relatively meaningless and the whole point is to give it up as if it were nothing and start over when a restart moment presents itself, which it inevitably does.