So I think this video project is what's going to officially drive me crazy. Seriously, headdesk doesn't cover this one. I'm ready to slam my face through a wall, and though I don't think my face would be very happy about it, I'm pretty sure the wall would still lose.
Realistically, the only good thing that has come out of this experience, is that it will make a fabulous linkdump SO I'M GOING TO TAKE ADVANTAGE LIKE THE WIND, BABY!
Right, so this has been my day:
Woke up at one. W00t. Then again, I'd been up until 4:30 this morning writing my NaNo. Not so w00t. Roommate and her boyfriend were already out. Very awesome. Opened Sims 2. Took a shower while waiting for it to open. It wasn't finished when I got back -___-.
When I finally got Sims going, I then proceeded to devote the next 5 hours to taking video. It was actually pretty fun, in the way that wrestling with sims and forcing them into submission is fun. For my efforts, I managed to collect all the video we needed for our project and then some. Unfortunately, the "high" quality video setting is a rather misleading lable, but you get the idea of what's going on, especially if you've played Sims 2 a lot. Sim videos are much funnier when you know all the different actions the characters are doing. You know, funny in the way that your soul is dying from the knowledge that those brain cells could be devoted to something else.
So I've got my video. Now, a less paranoid person might have just sent it over to the person responsible for putting the video together in Movie Maker and gotten on with her life. However, instead, I opened up Movie Maker and made sure that the files I'd just created were compatable with the program. Go to import files. They show up; all seems well. I click on one, just for fun. A black screen appears in the movie preveiw screen. I try hitting play. Nothing happens. I add the movie to the timeline. It adds as an AUDIO FILE.
This was still around when "headdesk" was appropriate. However, after searching through offical help sites, unoffical help sites, downloading codecs (that didn't help), searching for other codecs (that also did not help), and most likely exceeding my bandwidth limit, I was no closer to having useable files, and I was frustrated on top of that.
Finally, a friend pointed me to download.com, where I was able to find a converter, that allows me to convert my useless files into useable ones. Of course, since I'm not buying the software, it only lets me convert one at a time, and asks me "would you like to buy it now?" between every conversion, but I am still satisfied with my victory.
Unfortunately, due to this agrivation, I'm not going through hell and back AGAIN to find something that will convert Flash files into something useable in Movie Maker. We'll see if anything in the way of animations made by Abby makes its way into this movie, but as of now, I'm converting the files, and recovering for a while.