Nothing makes me more nervous than having to depend on technology in a “once in a lifetime” situation. I’ve done it a few times before and every time I’ve had butterflies in my stomach from start to finish.
For example, I’ve done three critical slideshows — two for weddings, the other for a funeral. Those are events you don’t want to screw up. Each of the slideshows consisting of photographs with music playing in the background. I work on computers every single day and while I know how reliable they can be, I also know how unreliable they can be as well. On all three instances I ended up burning the slideshows to DVD first, and then making multiple copies of the DVD. I know that for Andy’s wedding there were at least three copies of the slideshow at the church: I had one, Susan had one, and Andy had one.
I also played DJ at a couple of wedding receptions (my sister’s and Andy’s). At both of those events, all the music I played was in MP3 format and stored on my laptop. Things went fine in both cases, but in the back of my mind the entire event I kept secretly repeating to my laptop, “please don’t crash, please don’t crash …” It would have been impossible for me to listen to every single song I had downloaded prior to those events, so I just had to cross my fingers and hope that everything was labeled properly and everything went okay. Fortunately it did, but the fear was still there. It would be awful to have something go wrong and have people remember your wedding for that. (“Remember that DJ who accidentally played ‘Me So Horny’ for the Father/Daughter dance?”)
Unbeknownst to us at the time, the funeral home that did Jeff’s grandfather’s funeral last weekend recorded (both audio and video) the service. After the service, the funeral home presented Jeff’s family with recordings on both a VHS tape and a cassette tape. Jeff asked me if I would be able to transfer the VHS tape to a DVD; I said sure, and so the other night he brought it over.
The tape is almost unwatchable. I’m not sure what went wrong but it looks like the VCR they recorded the service with is way out of alignment; either that or they used the world’s crappiest video tape. Either way, I could not get a good picture from the tape. We even tried multiple VCRs; the one in my computer room (which has manual tracking) and the one in the living room (that has automatic tracking). Neither one was able to stablize the signal. Jeff is checking with the funeral home to see if they have another copy or if we can test the tape on their VCR and maybe make a copy using their VCR as the master and another one as a slave, but man, how disappointing will that be if the only copy is messed up.
We then went to work with the audio tape, which introduced another set of challenges. Apparently the funeral home records from a set of microphones that are located at the front of the funeral home. Unfortunately, no one who spoke at the funeral was anywhere near the microphones. Other than the occasional ripple of laughter, the tape basically sounded like empty hiss. I was able to record the tape into the computer using Vegas; from there I boosted the audio levels, which introduced both people speaking and a huge amount of hiss. Using WaveArts PowerSuite I was able to remove most of the hiss from the recording, leaving us with a fairly listenable recording (I tried compressing the track but it muddied the voices too much). At least we were able to save the audio; I’m hoping we can save the video too.
Sometimes I feel like electronics have a “fail sensor” that triggers whenever they feel stress around them.
Seriously. A few months ago, I was hosting a bachelor party for a friend of mine. Well, we all went out and everything, but we all wound up back at my place. The best man had hired a couple girls to visit and, er, strip.
I was told three different times that they would be bringing their own boom box.
Guess who showed up with no boom box?
I had just re-organized my home, and did not have speakers hooked up to the computer that was upstairs. Everyone’s yelling for there to be some music, instead of just, well, awkward silence as the girls did their thing, and I am ready to smash the PC in two because it (for the first time ever) won’t recognize the speakers. Just a straight 1/8″ plug, too, nothing magical.
Well, it’s obvious that it won’t work. I try to hook up my laptop into the speaker system of my actual house. That won’t work either, and the laptop falls, and rips the headphone jack apart. It’s still busted; what a pleasant memory from the evening. The screaming and yelling has continued, and I finally hooked my television into my home’s speaker system, and used one of those radio station channels that directv gives you. It was like working on the engines of the Enterprise right before the Project Genesis bomb went off. Success! There was music, finally. The party could enter warp speed.
Haha, no it didn’t, the girls left twenty minutes later and made it home safely. The end. =(
I’m Director of Visual Media at our church, so I know how technology can be. We rely quite a bit on the various pieces of equipment since we record DVDs of the sermon, do a live Internet stream for those unable to attend, and broadcast live over the radio. We’ve had lots of interesting issues crop up, such as a DVD that played perfectly many times during rehearsals, but skipped like crazy when I hit play during the service. I’ve run sound for numerous funerals now, a school Christmas song production, and ran lighting for our recent Steve Green concert (in which we had one of our stage VGA switchers fail – had to run a line up the balcony into the video booth to get the feed to our video switcher). I find it quite interesting what all fails right before or during critical moments. All it takes is one small brownout to take down our projectors for several minutes…. that’s why our music director still carries a stack of sheet music with him.