Frussssssstration!

Thats the state of things at the moment, pure frustration. We now have a backlog of about 14 hours of film tape waiting to be edited and uploaded. Included in the backlog is all the footage from ArtsFest, including our own Lyme Live ArtsFest Special, featuring among others local author Lucy Daniel Raby. There is the recent Three Cups Public Meeting at Woodmead Halls, and our own Lyme Live Woodmead Special with Mayor Michaela Ellis and Pip Evans. We have the annual Save the Children Concert from the Baptist Church Hall, the new organ at St. Michaels, a lot I can't remember there is so much, including a couple of Council Meetings. The sad thing is that some footage will be outdated by the time we can resume, or even, if we can resume., and will probably go straight onto CD and into our vast programme archive.

The hard part is that there is absolutely nothing we can do about it and we have ceased filming now because all our spare tape is locked up in the backlog. It's ironic that we now have four or five active camcorders, and have the capability of filming anything and everything that happens. We have a DVD copier that can churn out 10 Cd's or DVD's at once, which is great because out 'Postcard from Lyme' DVD is selling fairly well in town. It won't earn enough however to purchase a new laptop.

That is, in a nutshell the real problem. The only machine we have that is capable of editing video, groans and complains bitterly with real feeling every time I connect it to a camcorder. Editing video can be quite a long process, first the movie has to be uploaded into the computer in real time, That's one hour per tape. Then, besides the time it takes to edit and caption a full hour, it has to be 'saved'. That takes about another hour. After that, it takes another hour to upload to the TV Channel. A new laptop wouldn't change this, it will still take as long to edit and upload programmes, but at present, it takes the infernal machine more than an hour to save 10 minutes of video! Don't ask if we've done this or that to the computer, we have, we've defragged, cleared files, reformatted, updated, upgraded, disk cleaned up, and even hoovered the keyboard, but nothing doing. The hard drive has simply packed its bags and gone.

The thing we need, and have to have if we're to continue is a laptop with at minimum 100Gig hard drive, and about 4Gig ram memory. We could 'get by' with less, but these machines tend to be expensive, and without miracles, I don't think we will see much change out of £500. It's not all hopeless however, we beleive, in fact have been told, that forces are active in the town to get us back on the road again, and as soon as we are, I think we should have a celebration party with the headline, 'Disaster Narrowly Avoided' which I'm sure Pip Evans will describe as the worst headline he has seen since the one about small earthquakes in Chile!