Trials and Tribulations

In the week that just ended, I spent debugging a phenomenally hag-ridden process of capturing (digitizing) the images and video of students for a face to face class that we teach. The images that I had captured with the Optura Digital Video Camcorder were intolerably dark because I had adjusted the monitor's gamma (non-linear response to brightness) for a different purpose in one editing program but not in another. The Miro30 video capture card, with which we replaced a simple but functional one a couple of years ago again refused to capture good still images. I took a workaround (using a Snappy) and did the whole job before I felt that I could take time to go back and try changing every input parameter of the Miro 30 setup that could not possibly make a difference until I found the one that did. It turned out to be the setting on compression, which has no effect on the resulting image's file size, but which ruins the image's quality unless it is set for minimum compression. The old card had a way to turn compression off for image capture, but this Miro 30 card does not. Then some of the video, which played perfectly in the video editing software played not only upside-down but color-reversed on one of two installed versions of Media Player. That turned out to be because one version uses the hardware assist function of the capture card, which of course knows all about the format of the video it produces, whereas the other version uses software-only decompression and does not quite understand the video's format. The whole thing is sufficiently complex to demand a 5-page step-by-step cookbook for the students, who later in the summer come to our house to use that card to capture video they take themselves. I had to find steps that would not lead them to video that made them look violet and inverted.

As a hint, it is well worth making a detailed cookbook of these kind of procedures, especially if you do not do them every day or if you change your computer setup even a little.

As another trial and tribulation, we just installed Dreamweaver 2.0 and several other pieces of software and Internet support on a new laptop. Right before preparing to demo to our class, we remembered that things can go wrong. We tried to use the behavior inspector of Dreamweaver 2.0 to specify playing of sound when you roll your mouse over an image. This is supposed to be simple and has worked in the past. That is, it worked in the past before we installed Quick Time 3.0 on this new computer. If you are not careful, Quick Time 3.0 installs not only its players but its plug-ins that take precedence over, in our case, Netscape's LiveAudio plug-in which is the one that works with Dreamweaver's sound playing behavior. This took a bit of debugging and using a search engine on Internet to get a hint of what could possibly be wrong.

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