*pokes at her mac with a stick*

So I've discovered a great big rule: never throw anything away or copy over it if you MIGHT use it for school again.

The summer before I defended my thesis I was in a Vaudeville show. I wanted to tape it, but forgot to buy new mini dv's for that explicit purpose. So I taped over some raw footage that I had used in a project earlier that year (which I am now hacking apart for my "final project" for class) which was fine at the time. Not so cool when I figure out that was the tape that I had all my interviews on.

Yeah, I'm stupid. Don't mind me.

Fortunately I found a really nice cheap tool that FINALLY worked to pull off the video + audio and squish them back together properly from the DVD I have of the first project (it's 30 minutes long). What's bad is that I know there was some original video that would work better than what was left (and I did have about four hours anyway, just not what I wanted) but I guess I have to make do.

But what this leaves me with is pre-edited video, disembodied voices in parts over explanatory video, and a lot of talk about literacy that I flat out don't need for this project.

It also leaves me with a couple audio level drops that I can't fix without doing a lot of extra work (yes, I know about the clip volume adjustment thingy in iMovie, and I've been using it, and I know I could export the clip in question and increase its volume and then re-import it, but when I do that it gets static-y, and I KNOW I could use some expensive software I have to clean the damn audio by hand, but...)

Yeah, but. But if I were one of my students I'd tell them to leave it, that the message of the video isn't lost because of these 2 random audio drops. That they shouldn't spend HOURS cleaning up one section (though they would for a more professional, being paid for project).

I think if the computer were running more smoothly it'd be easy for me to say that I'm definitely going to clean it up. But as it stands I feel like I'm poking it with a stick and rebooting a lot just to get what I've got. Plus I couldn't even get iMovie to load the waveforms for my mp3s to line stuff up as well as I'd like, I don't think I have a chance in hell of getting any of my audio software to run that's more advanced than Audiacity (which I hate, with a bloody passion, but have been using anyway because it doesn't eat up all my processing power).

I dunno, I'm *not* my own student in this case, even though I'm doing my own assignment. Bah, maybe I'll finish some other stuff and see how much time I have left first...