Tuesday, January 16, 2018

Getting Ducks Your Ducks in a Row

Nothing will enable a procrastinator like ducks.  Not actual ducks, but proverbial ducks, which need to be in a row.  The reason the ducks need to be in a row makes more sense if you think about them as Dominoes.  One out of the place and the line doesn't work properly when  you try to knock them down.

Today, the big Domino (or duck, which metaphor do we like better here?) is my new hard drive. (Thanks Mom and Dad).  External hard drives have lifespans.  All that spinning.  You don't want to lose what's on them and backing up is essential and something most of us don't do often enough.  Also, as movies get longer,  you do more projects,  you build a larger stock footage library that you want at your fingertips, these drives fill up.  So, every couple of years or every few projects, whichever necessitates things first, I get a new, bigger drive, give it the same letter as an old drive and replace the old one.  The reason for this is, my software which uses clips for multiple projects can always find them if I keep the letters the same.  It simplifies my work flow to have a couple of main drives instead of just adding and adding and adding new letters.  At one time I had quite a little alphabet going.

I have plenty of room to finish Jack vs Lanterns on the drive I'm working on, so why is this new drive so important?  I had no drive to back  up the work to any longer.  My lead duck was fine, but the duck behind him was falling behind and she filled up before the lead duck was finished, where would I be?

By the way, the he/she designations for my ducks come from back when I worked in a bar that was in a  hotel, which had ducks.  Those ducks would march twice daily.  It was adorable, the male led four hens and all of them followed the "Duck Master" into an elevator up to their luxury suite.  I miss those ducks and the really helped put the whole "Ducks in a Row" thing into perspective.  Yep, we're going with the duck analogy.

So, I have had the hard drive for awhile, but knew I would need to set aside some time to move files over.  So, I kept using the old one, working on the movie and other edits so I wouldn't tie  up my editing computer with this move.  Problem is, the more I piled onto the old drive, the more I would need to move.  So, today, being a winter day I was planning on spending home anyway, I decided to make the movie.  A few hours, I suspected.  Right now the computer is telling me 22.  I sincerely hope it is wrong, but we'll see.

In the meantime, I set up the studio for another duck yesterday.  What I hope will be a 3D video review of a 3D movie.  It always works better with a bit of Chroma or Color Key to help drop the background out.

I'm going to leave my office for awhile so that I don't have to keep watching the computer tell me this actually going to take longer than it expected.

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