Life with Electra

STIPIMM: "I Should Be Allowed to Think," by They Might Be Giants

The life of a videographer/editor nowadays is completely wrapped up in computing and the digital world. Whether we like it or not, our ability to do our jobs is based in large part in the quality of our computers. Where people in my profession once oohed and ahhed mostly over cameras, lenses, film stock and the like, nowadays filmmakers are just as likely to go ga-ga for a new super-charged computer systems or some new features in editing software.

I am no stranger to this. I have regularly remarked to myself that it is strange that, as a film/videomaker, the only magazine to which I religiously subscribe is Macworld, not American Cinematographer, not Filmmaker Magazine, not even Entertainment Weekly (birthday and Christmas gift hints…ahem). And usually, reading Macworld is an exercise in wishful thinking -- my budget has no leeway for new systems or even souped-up new peripherals. But it does one good to dream, I suppose.

Besides, I have had pretty much all I really needed to do my work, from shooting to editing. At the center of this is my Apple G4 Powerbook, which goes by the name Electra. When I bought her several years ago, she was of course the top of her line -- fast, efficient, glitch-free. It was one of the best investments I ever made, second maybe only to my Canon GL2 video camera. She has served me well ever since the day she arrived on my doorstep. However, I fear that her remaining days with me are numbered, and this worries me and my pocketbook greatly.

Even though she's worked well overall, life with Electra hasn't been all peachy. Indeed, sometimes I think she's held together with baling string and duct tape. Here are some of the problems that Electra has had and continues to have:

   1) About a year after purchasing her, for no reason that I could figure, the DVD drive stopped working. Whenever I tried to insert a disk, it just spit it right back out at me. This was an especially bad problem because I burned a hell of a lot of CDs and DVDs in my time. Instead of buying a new drive and paying for installation, I found a cheaper work-around and bought an external DVD burner. That solution's worked very well ever since, although it is sometimes still a pain.
   2) About half a year after the DVD drive went kaput, the Airport card slot stopped working. Now, for those of you who don’t know Macs, the Airport is Apple's wireless system. The Airport card is what the laptop uses to communicate with a wireless Internet connection. And now that wasn't working on Electra, so I couldn't connect wirelessly to the Internet. Again in this case, instead of paying for a repair, I went the cheap and inconvenient route -- I connect to the Internet through an Ethernet cable, just as one would with a desktop computer.
   3) When I first bought her and ran Final Cut Pro on her, she was fast and furious. But, as software inevitably does, further editions of Final Cut Pro (the video editing software I use most [don't tell my employer!]) got more complicated, and thus ran more slowly on my computer. It begs the question, why didn't you just stick with the older version… and well, there's an argument to be made for that. However, with "Commit to the Line," and other stuff, it was beneficial to update the software, and (especially with "Commit") I had the opportunity to upload the software for free, which was a hard offer to pass up.
   4) I took Electra all sorts of places, even on vacation sometimes, and the physical wear and tear has taken its toll. Beyond cosmetic nicks and abrasions, the latch that holds her shut finally stopped closing late last year. Then, one day a few months ago, she fell out of the car (making my heart stop for a few seconds), and damaged (but didn't break!) one of the hinges that holds the screen to the computer. Now, opening her up is a delicate process, lest I damage the hinge further.
   5) Her battery, having gone through more charge cycles than I can count, is next to worthless. You can't use her without plugging her in for more than 15 minutes at a time.

Electra has become more of a desktop machine, i.e., I don't really take her around too much, in part because it would add to the wear and tear, and in part because of the issues above (especially the battery). But all these issues, in the grand scheme of things, are relatively minor. She still runs all the software that's on her very well.

A couple of weeks ago, however, a new issue arose that couldn't be as easily glossed over and worked around. Electra's screen began getting these funky looking striations on them, all over the screen. It started pretty mildly, with only a little bit of problem here or there, but it progressively got worse over the course of a day. Rebooting didn't help. Shutting her down for a day didn't help either. None of the standard troubleshooting techniques helped.

I was going to load up a picture of this problem, but for some reason I can't find the one I took last week… I'll have to load it later. But trust me, it was bad. My best guess as to the source of the problem was a dying video card, which as any computer person can tell you is not an easy or cheap thing to fix. I was able to do some things with Electra, but photo and graphics work was impossible, and perhaps most importantly, doing video work was an eye-strain-inducing ordeal.

Indeed, it was this last point that was really the most worrisome. Electra is my lifeblood when it comes to editing, and without her, some of the projects I'm working on would pretty much be dead in the water. With the problem getting worse with no signs of improvement, I sat Bridget down and introduced her to a grim reality -- if Electra died outright or this problem continued, we'd have to start looking at getting a new computer.

And getting a new computer that can do the things I need it to is almost as big a deal (money-wise) as buying a used car. If you're going to get a new computer, you better get a darn good one, because buying something lower on the ladder of quality will just make it obsolete that much quicker. And a darn good computer in my industry costs anywhere from $2,500 to $3,500.

There's the obvious question: do you really need a computer right away? Short answer, no, but soon. There's just no realistic way I can do editing, graphics work and all the various stuff I do without a good computer. It's like my friend Imogen's recent issues with her car -- if it were up to her, she'd make do with her broken car or just doing without, but because she has to travel around in her job, it's a necessity to have a reliable car. So too with filmmaking and computers.

But of course, we don't have $2,500 just sitting around -- if we did, it would be going straight to the still-not-fully-funded "Indian Girl" film project. We'd have to tap into credit once more, which is not a last-resort option, to be sure, but a necessary one.

But then, just as I was starting to despair over the situation and preparing myself for the necessity of a major purchase (and yet secretly relishing the idea of a powerful new machine), Electra started showing signs of improvement late last week. Out of nowhere, applications that were once illegible were showing up crisp and clean. Pretty soon, everything was back to looking normal. The picture at the top of the post was taken this morning and shows how Electra looks now (you'll be able to compare it to how she looked when she was sick when I post the picture).

So, what happened? Hell if I know. The only thing that I can figure might have happened is that I downloaded some intensive database software a few weeks ago (it was for the nightmare film project I blogged about last week). I removed it last week thinking maybe, just maybe it was causing the problem. And so… now the problem's gone. Could it have been that software? Maybe…but I still don’t know how it caused it. Of course, Andrew and Marianne's computer (which used to be mine) has recently had a different kind of screen problem that seemed to magically work itself out over the weekend. Did the laptop fairies finally get around to visiting Massachusetts and sprinkling their pixie dust over all the computers of all the good boys and girls of the commonwealth?

Now that she's back to running normally, I'm handling her very delicately. I've told Bridget not to shut her down outright, for fear that it might trigger a relapse. Basically, it's a wait-and-see approach for the time being, tiptoeing around her, keeping my fingers crossed, and trying not to do anything to piss her off (kind of like how I handle my marriage…). With any luck, she'll last until next year when we can make a plan about buying a new machine. In the meantime, I'll keep reading Macworld and dreaming…