Monday, February 14, 2022
6:01 a.m. Room 1102 Phannu House
Mae Sot, Thailand
I’m a little disappointed in myself every morning now when I write “Phannu House, Mae Sot” as my location. I still feel the energy of my trip to the north in my veins, and I wish I was still in that space mentally and physically. I want to be that guy who is moving. I want that energy back, that excitement, that mood. I can even see the difference in my sleep patterns. I slept so well during that trip. And I felt good all the time. But now I find myself back in that pattern where I wake up at five in the morning, and I know I’m still tired. I know I’ll be exhausted during the day if I get out of bed. I know I haven’t gotten enough sleep. Yet, I have no choice but to get up. Once my brain starts chugging along, I won’t be able to go back to sleep.
However, I am still working on my videos from the north. And it makes sense to be based here while I do that. It’s comfortable and affordable. And if I just set off on more small adventures, I’d just have more video to deal with. And I don’t have the time for that. So, I’m just hunkering down and chipping away at video archives.
I had a rough day yesterday. I finished editing a very long and very complicated video. And I was pleased about that, but then the rendering failed. It turned into a little bit of a frustrating odyssey spanning the entire day. The main problem is that as much as I like editing video on a smartphone, the smartphone applications are not very sophisticated. They manage the basics quite well, but that’s about it. And I normally only need the basics. But in this case, the limited ability caused problems. The main problem was that even though the rendering of the final video failed and I got an error message, the system was unable to tell me what the problem was. So I can’t fix it. Plus, I don’t get these error messages at the start of the render. I get it at the end. And this particular video, being relatively long and complex, took an hour and a half to export. So I would have to wait for nearly two hours while my phone worked. And then with one minute left in the export job, it would fail. And with no clear information about the source of the problem, I just had to guess. I’d go into the editing program and make changes and adjustments to the sections that I thought might be causing the problem. Then the only way to know if I’d fixed the problem was to export the file again. And I’d have to wait another hour and a half to two hours, and then the export would fail again at the very last minute. This went on all day.
I eventually discovered that the problem had nothing to do with anything in the video file itself. The problem was that the final video file size was too large. And my smartphone was unable to store a single file that large. Once I figured that out, I had to do more tests to try to figure out what was an acceptable size. And then I could adjust the bitrate or resolution of the final output to achieve that size and not exceed it.
I’d run into this problem in the past in other situations, and it annoys me a little bit. There’s no reason that it should happen. I should get the error message before the rendering even starts. The editing program knows how large the final video file will be. It tells you that right at the beginning. It makes a calculation based on the length, resolution, and bit rate of that particular task. And the final size is listed right there on the screen. I can see it myself. And if that file size is too large, the system should already know. That’s how computers operate, after all. If I try to copy a 25-gigabyte file onto a memory card, and that memory card only has 20 gigabytes of available memory left, it tells me right away. I get the error message that there isn’t enough space available. And that’s logical. The computer doesn’t just go through the process of copying as much of the file as possible and then at the very end tell you there isn’t enough room. It tells you before the process starts.
But my smartphone editing app doesn’t do this. It could do it. It has the capability. It has the information. But the programmers simply decided to leave that feature out. So the program has to go through the entire job and then at the very end, it runs into the problem and fails. It forces you to do all the work before it tells you that all your work was a waste of time.
And this experience yesterday has got me thinking that I really should make an effort to switch to laptop-based video editing. I have this MacBook Pro, after all. I should use it. I’ve been working on making the switch ever since I got the laptop, but nothing has worked for me. I tried to use Apple’s iMovie, but I hated that program. That was a disaster. I can’t quite remember now if I tried any other programs, but I ended up trying to use DaVinci Resolve. And I had all kinds of problems with DaVinci Resolve as well. I fought through those, and that is the program I’m using now. But it isn’t appropriate for my needs. And it is far too slow. It’s a massive and powerful program meant for professionals doing complex jobs on powerful computers. And this MacBook just isn’t up to it. And I don’t need all that power and all those features. I’m not sure what analogies I’ve used in the past to describe this, but me using DaVinci Resolve to edit my simple videos is like using the US space program and a space shuttle to go to the corner variety store to buy milk. I suppose you could launch a space shuttle into space and then back down again to travel the three blocks to the 7-Eleven. But you don’t really need to. I could just walk or ride a bicycle. And I need the bicycle equivalent of a video editing program.
Yesterday, I felt energized once again to locate a suitable video editing program for this Mac, and I may have found one. At least I have found one that is promising enough for me to at least put in the effort to try it out. This program is called PowerDirector. I’ve used PowerDirector on smartphones, and I liked it. I guess you would call it a prosumer program. It’s not meant for professionals, in the way that DaVinci Resolve is. And it’s not a simplistic toy meant for basic consumers. It’s in the middle, which is why it fits into the prosumer category. I understood that PowerDirector was only available for Windows computers. But the company recently released a version that runs on Macs. I don’t know for sure that it will run on my MacBook, but I think I’m going to give it a try. That is going to be my task for this week. I’m going to clean out my Mac and get it ready for this program. (It requires a lot of memory.) And then I’m going to figure out how to buy it and install it. It may not be that easy, because it isn’t available in the usual Apple Store. I honestly dislike having a MacBook. I dislike the Apple ecosystem so much. If this were a Windows laptop, it would be so much easier. Everything is in the Google Play Store. But Apple puts such tight controls on everything that there are roadblocks everywhere, and they won’t allow applications like PowerDirector to be in the Apple store. I guess they want to force people to use iMovie and other Apple products.
I’ve also been thinking about what to do with “stuff” again – both stuff here in Thailand and the stuff in Malaysia. The issue is that I really don’t know what I’m going to do next or where I’m going to go if I settle down for a while. If I knew that, decisions would be easier. But I really don’t. If, for example, I knew I was going to look for a job in Thailand, I’d just take all the extra gear I have and store it here. Why not keep it for a later date? If I knew I was going to return to Taiwan, I could box up all this stuff and ship it there. But I simply don’t know. I could just throw this stuff away or give it away or sell it, but it holds a lot of value. Selling things secondhand always means losing much of its worth. For example, I have a Sirui tabletop tripod. It’s not the most expensive thing in the world, I’ll admit, but I paid $100 US for it in Kuala Lumpur. As mini-tripods go, it is quite nice. It’s quite a specialized tool that I needed at the time. Most people would be happy with a $20 mini-tripod. But I needed the features that this more expensive model offered.
But since then, my needs have changed, and it’s now a heavy chunk of rubber and steel that I’d rather not carry around with me anymore. I don’t really have as much use for it anymore. However, trying to sell it used, I’d be lucky to get $20 for it. That’s just how things work. When you buy something brand new from the store, you are willing to dig deeper into your wallet. The company can charge $100 for this tripod and people will buy it at the store. But it’s not like I can advertise it for $80 and tell people that they can buy it from me and save $20. People wouldn’t pay $50 for it or even $30. As I said, I’d be lucky to get $20, and that’s not even worth the time and effort it would take to sell it. So what do I do with it? I can give it away. Or I can box it up and ship it somewhere and store it for some distant time in the future when I might get some use out of it.
I ran into this exact issue when I was leaving my somewhat settled life in Taiwan. I tried to sell some items, and the hassle was so great that I just gave up. I ended up boxing up a fair bit of stuff and shipping it to Canada. (Surface mail out of Taiwan was cheap at that time.) For the rest, I just threw open the doors to my apartment and let people come in and walk out with whatever they wanted. I smile now when I think about that time. I remember a friend of mine, a Taiwanese woman, was interested in my desktop computer. It was one of those big and complicated setups with all the stuff: big computer box; big monitor; mouse; speakers; keyboard; giant voltage regulator and surge protector system; all the cables and cords and plugs you can imagine. It was just too much to try to sell. It was a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster computer that I’d assembled and half built myself and adapted over the years.
This woman came over one day with a friend in her friend’s car to pick the whole thing up. And while she was there, she was sort of looking around my apartment, and she spotted one of those water heater units that sits on a counter. Like a kettle. And she asked me what I was going to do with that. And I said she could take it away. It’s all yours, I told her. And then she spotted my microwave. “What about the microwave?” she asked. Take it, I said. Anything you want. And she ended up filling up her friend’s car with stuff. And when I finally left that apartment, I just left all the furniture in place – all the big stuff – bookshelves, desks, tables, chairs, sofas. I just walked out the door and left it behind. It was so much easier than trying to sell it.
To be honest, even giving it away was too much hassle. I can never just hand something over. In the case of the computer system, when I knew I was giving it to this woman, I had to spend the better part of two days making sure that everything worked and was in good condition. I took it all apart and cleaned it and packaged it. Of course, I had to format and wipe clean the two hard drives and then reinstall the operating system and get it all to a factory state. And I had to explain to her exactly what she was getting. And then there was all the time involved in making arrangements for her to come over. And my apartment was on the rooftop of a six-floor building with no elevator. So I had to help her carry everything down to her friend’s car. And that was complicated because the road was narrow, and there was nowhere to park. It was a LOT. I put more work into giving this woman my computer than most people would put into buying a brand new computer system.