Hobbies are expensive! Especially if you are into the electronic gadgets. So the April showcase spun my frenzy of getting new gadgets for the task. I’ve been reading www.stuckincustoms.com and learning about HDR. But the Nikon D40 is really beat up and not up to par for this ever progressing field of photography. The showcase gave me the final nudge and I went to Bestbuy and got the Nikon D7000. It’s the first new toy for me. I’m thrilled to no end and will use it to improve my photo taking skills for the foreseeable future. Next, I ordered the Adobe Photoshop Creative Suite Master collection from Amazon. The two day delivery wait was excruciating. When they finally arrived, the next hurdle really put me in a depression. Just before the software arrived, I found out that my university offers an educational discount that is way more than what Amazon offers. Leo stopped me from opening the package so we can return them and get them from the university rep. ohhhhh, that was cruel. It is so close and yet I can’t touch it. I emailed the rep and still in the process of going through the purchase. He said a week but he is also not answering my email today. uuuuuuugh. But good things come from hickups. I got a second chance to rethink my media editing situation. Leo is also in the process of scanning his old photos and putting them online. It would be great if he can use the photoshop to touch up some of those real old and fading photos. He has an iMac. I got the windows version of the Photoshop Suite. But if I go the Mac route, then we can share the software.
I had to go to the Apple store yesterday to get the iPad VGA dongle for a work project — it is something else and a long story. I had in my mind to look at the MacBook Pro. It just came out with the quadcore processor. The first salesman was so very helpful. He even talked to the manager about the new iPad2 we are looking at for our project. And he has done some video editing himself so we were on the same plane. We settled on the MacBookPro i7 quad with 8 Gigs of RAM and a faster 500 gig hard drive. Leo made me stop and sit and strategize the computing setup for home before we went back in to purchase the shiny toy. Unfortunately, he got into an argument with the salesman about apple care and educational discount verification for no apparent point. It got us all worked up a bit. Then the salesman told me not to get it and wait and do the online purchase with customization. Geeeze. Why does a salesman would stop a customer from buying is beyond me. I walked out deflated and disappointed and was on the verge of tears. Two big disappointments a day was too much for me. Leo quickly saw my predicament and stopped and parked the car and took me back to the store. We went for the default hard drive but opted for the 8 Gigs of RAM still. 20 minutes later, we walked out with the brand new MacBook Pro.
So, now I have a brand new notebook and some crazy software to try. I downloaded the OS update and the Adobe collection (trial version) last night. Can’t wait to get in there and do the nitty gritty things and get my hands dirty with them. I am finally entering the Mac world for real. I’ve always known that the creative people like to use the Mac to do their editing. I am going to follow their lead and start my photo and video editing on the mac. Can’t totally leave my Windows root though for the side jobs I do for the studio that has a Microsoft Access app on their PC. But for media work, I will use the mac. Doing a lot of googling on how to organize media files right now. I’ve had enough bad experiences from the previous showcases, I know it is the most important step. You don’t want to be hunting for the video files 6 months later when the client comes back and ask for a copy of a clip in last year’s showcase after you have moved the video files off the computer to make room on the hard drive. Oh, what a nightmare. The video files were on the home server but the project files on the computer and they lost the connection with each other and there is no way to quickly extract the clip. I had to start from scratch, importing the video to a windows PC and repeat the whole process. That was ugly.
Can’t wait to produce the showcase videos on the MBP. Oh joy, joy.