After reading the PDF manual for my new (outdated) digital camera over the course of a few weeks, taking all the accessories out of the box, and charging the battery on Saturday morning, I shot a 2.5 minute clip, starring Dad, on Sunday morning. Despite him being lethargic, I was very excited to take that baby step, which was psychologically a very huge step. After all, I’d done just about everything else under the guise of preparing myself to practice shooting video.
The last thing I wanted to do was wait until the day of the event and use the equipment for the first time. So, I’ve avoided that much. Now the next step was to figure out postproduction.
I didn’t buy the latest version of this camera, which would have cost far more and not come with any accessories. Besides, since I’m an emerging filmmaker with a very modest budget, I stayed in my financial lane.
One thing that I overlooked was that the manual was written at the time that this particular camera was top of the line, rather than antiquated. Once I got toward the end of the manual, I saw that I could connect the camera to the laptop with a cable, use a card reader with the SD card, or import the images/videos via Wi-Fi.
I suspected that I already had a cable to connect the camera to the computer attachment (since newer laptops no longer have all the fancy ports like the ol’ school laptops used to have!) somewhere in the bowels of my large bag full of such cables. I was in no mood to detangle all those cables. After I finally sorted and filed all the loose important papers over the Thanksgiving long weekend, organizing the electronic cable bag became my new thing to cringe over. And put off organizing until Christmas break.
Corner of Tangled Cables
So, yes, I ended up buying a cable only to discover the very next day when I braved the cable bag for something else, that I DID already have that damn cable because it was old tech. I comforted myself thinking that it only costed $10 with tax, so lesson learned!
Now that I had twice as many cables needed to connect my laptop to the camera, I then had to download the appropriate version of the software. Here’s how I knew I was in trouble: none of the versions were as current as my brand-new laptop. I tried anyway. Of course it didn’t work. Whatever I installed, never acknowledged that my camera was connected to the laptop even after disabling the Wi-Fi on the camera, which was apparently a step I had to take.
I just took a deep breath, disconnected everything and researched the other two ways.
The next thing I tried was to connect the camera to Wi-Fi. At least I didn’t have to buy anything. I enabled the Wi-Fi, selected the correct Wi-Fi name, but instead of asking for the password, it asked for some other computer geek thing that I didn’t know how to answer and never got passed that step.
Finally, I tried using the SD card. I’d resisted using this method because I was determined not to buy anything else if I could help it. Turned out, the multiple port attachment I’d bought since my new laptop had only two USB-C ports, had both an SD and an SD card adapter ports. I popped the SD card adapter out of the camera and slid it into the port, where it appeared in Finder.
Just to recap: not only did I NOT need any cable, but I didn’t need the new cable that I’d bought, which was redundant in the first place! In time, I won’t dwell on it.
After moving the MOV folder, which contained two MOV clips, to the “Movie” category in Finder, I then labelled both the folders and the clips. May have seemed a little bit overkill, but I wanted to start off as organized as possible, especially since one day, that humble beginnings folder will be the first of many.
This IS my film school.