Things are getting pretty hectic around here lately. We have a video project that we have been working on for about seven months and everytime we get it finished, the client changes their minds about what they want. This is all fine because we get paid by the hour… the problem comes with their deadlines. We will hear at 8:30pm on a Friday night that they finally reviewed the master sitting on their desk for the last month and decide on some ‘minor’ changes – and, oh yeah – we need it in Canada by Sunday morning. NOT going to happen. The minor changes usually require a complete rerendering of the project as well as burning of DVDs – we are talking days of computer time.

Well, this project is again on one of those “gotta have it yesterday” deadlines and now we are having major system problems. One of the main editing stations has suddenly decided that what should take four hours to render is now going to take “about a day.” Those are not my words… that is the freakin’ program… where it used to show an estimate like “Time Left 45 minutes” it actually reads “Time Left about a day.” We moved a bunch of stuff over to another editing station and that takes hours in itself to move those files and just when we worked out all the bugs about how it should find its source files on the network… I am chugging along… 40 minutes remaining on the first of eight renders and THE FREAKIN’ POWER GOES OUT!!

Heck of a time to learn that the battery backup works, but not real good… It let through enough of a surge to reboot the machine… yeah, now it has to be started over once again.

In addition to the troubles with this project, we have two others that have pretty short deadlines. One client wants 75 DVDs made by the end of the week… I had to tell him it will be next week. We also shot another project yesterday and have a very short turnaround time because in two weeks we have another three day shoot which will eat up ALL our storage space and tie us up for a month.

Here is Davad S. and David P. shooting some content for a streaming website yesterday.

As of this blogging, I have just restarted the current project rendering for about the tenth time. It says it has two hours until it is completed, so I am going to run some errands… I am praying it will be either finished or still running when I get back.