All’s well that ends well
My Firewire adventure had a happy ending after I bought another cable for Rp100,000 from another shop. Later I found a cheaper cable in Gramedia for Rp89,000 but no matter, all I hoped for was that it would work and it did. The lesson learned was that all cables are not created equal and the Rp25,000 cable that I originally bought, even though it looked identical to my more expensive one, simply didn’t work. While I was purchasing my new cable, I noticed that the shop was also offering MEMORY STICK PRO Duo 2Gb for Rp185,000, whereas a couple of days earlier I’d purchased a similar product for more than twice that. When I queried the price, the salesgirl said that it wasn’t genuine but a copy. My eyes have certainly been opened to the dark recesses of the computer accessories world where anything that can be copied is and it’s difficult to tell the real from the imitation.
With my new cable, the wrapping was moulded plastic and there was a cardboard backing that announced among other things: Idol Data Cable – Ultra Hi-Speed Connection Japan. By contrast, my original cable came simply in a cheap, clear plastic bag. So I guess the packaging is a clue, even though this could be easily replicated. In my case, it was the price that aroused my suspicions and so this is another clue, although once again it would be easy to offer the product at a more credible price. I’ll certainly be ultra-cautious in future when purchasing computer accessories.
Having succeeded in connecting the camcorder to my laptop, the videos downloaded without difficulty in .avi format at a resolution of 720 x 576 which is far from high resolution but even at this resolution a 4min23sec clip occupied 938Mb of hard disk storage space. I guess that a high resolution (1920 x 1080) video of similar length would occupy 5 times that amount because there are 5 times as many pixels. That’s where terabyte hard drives that come as an option with the iMac are going to be more in demand and why processors with grunt will be needed to handle multimedia data for the forseeable future. With current Internet speeds, there is no way that gigabytes of data can be uploaded. The data needs to be edited to a manageable size on a laptop or desktop PC and then uploaded to the Internet. My new foray into video editing also gives me the opportunity to investigate the intricacies of the various file formats (avi versus mpeg for example) but I’ll leave that to a future post.
Filed under: Uncategorized
