Hidden costs

Well if we paint the room, we'll need to buy new furniture...

We finally bought a camcorder. With the events we've been running and the Year in Review DVDs we've been putting together, it would be nice to capture some footage. Trying to save some money, we bought a relatively inexpensive model.

It turns out that the only way to connect the camcorder to the computer is through a firewire card, which I didn't have on my laptop or desktop. So off to the computer store. I plugged the new card into the desktop computer and it worked without incident. However, when I started downloading the videos, the files were dropping many frames making the video choppy.

After doing some troubleshooting and tweaking a couple things, it still wasn't working well. My computer only had the minimum of memory recommended, and I would still need to buy a DVD burner. The desktop computer is also about 8 years old (from the Jurassic era I believe) so I wasn't sure how well it would handle editing video.

I did some shopping around and I was able to find a new system with a DVD burner for about $150 more than updating my old system with memory and a burner. Of course there are no Windows XP computers out there anymore, so now I have Vista. We'll see if it is as painful as the Apple commercials make it sound.

The videos downloaded without a frame dropped. So far so good. Of course my video software isn't Vista compatible, so there will be some more updating this week.