Alyssa and I went out into the country Sunday night (after stopping by Taco Bell to try those new chicken taquitos) to watch the Perseid meteor shower. We watched for an hour and only saw 3 comet particles burn up in the atmosphere. Disappointing. Maybe there was just too much light from the city still glowing up the sky from a distance.
We're watching The Mummy next class period. Can. Not. Wait.
The guys seemed to really dig The Body Snatcher on the latest Splattercast. Even Deejay seemed to like it, which I found sort of surprising. Next up on my list The Ghoul and a companion piece of sorts to The Body Snatcher, the Peter Cushing/Donald Pleasance vehicle The Flesh and the Fiends. This underrated film actually focuses on Burke and Hare rather than the Robert Louis Stevenson short story that Body Snatcher is based on. It'll be interesting to see how they compare the two.
Rather than post all 113 of my favorite films in one post, I'm just going to do 10 or so at a time. These are in no particular order since most of these will just be off the top of my head until i start getting down to the last 20 or so, but here's the first 10:
1) Big Trouble in Little China
2) I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang
3) Halloween
4) The Last Man on Earth
5) Requiem for a Dream
6) The Body Snatcher (it's fresh in my memory!)
7) Wild Boys of the Road
8) Paranoiac
9) Cell 2455, Death Row
10) Vertigo
I am mad at technology. Mostly because I just don't understand it. I've got this problem that's annoying simply because I don't get how to easily fix the problem when I know an answer is floating out there somewhere.
Last friday, Turner Classic Movies had a Vincent Price marathon and there were a couple flicks that I had to obtain. There are multiple reasons why TCM is the best movie channel on television, but one of the foremost reasons is that they show old movies that are unavailable on DVD or VHS. Every once in a while, the occasional unreleased horror film will be shown. One of these films was The Mad Magician which I've only read about and eagerly wanted to record. I've got my computer hooked up so that I can watch cable television on it and used Windows Media Center to record the film while I was at school . So now I've got an unavailable copy of The Mad Magician sitting patiently on my harddrive. Awesome!
Well, sorta. I hate watching movies on my monitor, so I decided to use Media Center to burn a DVD of the film. It'll burn the film all right, but after 2 freaking hours, it was only 25% finished. It seems the "this may take several hours" message is right on. I got sick of waiting and tried to look for an alternate way to burn the disc. There must be an easier way, right? So I look at the file and it is in some div-r format. I tried opening it in Premiere and it is an unsupported file type. I tried using MovieMaker and got the same message. I was hoping to open up the damn file and trim the bit of commercials I recorded before and after the film but apparently I can't do that. I'm assuming I need to convert this div-r file to something else in order to allow me to open it in an editing program, but damn if I'm not just pissed off at the whole thing. I went into the Media Center options to see if it can output my recorded movies to a different file type but couldn't find any such option.
I really like the ability to record these rare films on my PC. I've normally had to make due with taping them to VHS, which degrades the picture quality something terrible, and I really don't want to go back to that way of procuring stuff like The Mad Magician. I know there must be an easy way to correct this situation. I just wish I had that knack for "getting" technology that all my other friends seem to have. Eh, I'm sure I'll figure it out soon enough.
Now, time to go watch Slaughter Hotel
1 comment:
I don't know a ton about the specific software that you're using, but I do burn a lot of DVDs and, from what I understand, there is no quicker way to do it.
The video files that you have on your computer aren't in the same format as the video files that work with DVD players. The conversion from pc-format to DVD-format takes a lot of time and effort from your CPU. What I generally do is put a DVD in to burn before I go to bed at night, then it's ready the next morning and I didn't have to sit and watch the PC chug along.
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