Alphabetical Site Index

Video Production Problems

by David W. Roscoe

I had many problems that delayed or reduced the quality of the production and distribution of my video, The Adventures Of Running Nerd. Most, but not all, of these problems were Computer Problems, because most of the work was capturing and editing video clips using nonlinear video editing software. I document these problems here.

These problems are noteworthy for:

• The large fraction of days on which I had problems. I use bold face to indicate the few days on which there were no problems.
• The total number of problems.
• And the weirdness of some particular problems.

The Probability of all these problems, or any significant fraction of them, happening at random is very small.

People at Chelmsford TeleMedia knew about some of these problems. I sometimes joked that the problems happened because I was jinxed. I think that a few times they were beginning to believe me.

Please note the following.

• At their request, I always telephoned Chelmsford TeleMedia before visiting. I do not include days on which I did not visit because they said that the facilities were busy.
• Person's names refer to people at Chelmsford TeleMedia. Some were paid staff. Some were volunteers.
• Most of these problems happened at Chelmsford TeleMedia, but this list should not be interpreted as a criticism of Chelmsford TeleMedia or it's people. Most of these problems are Computer Problems similar to the ones that I have at home with my own computers.

The following is a chronological list of every day on which I tried to do any significant work on the production or distribution of my video The Adventures Of Running Nerd, and the problems I had, through 2003 Nov 20.

• 2003/05/04 I made my first telephone call to Chelmsford TeleMedia and recorded a message. In this and later calls I expressed my interest in learning digital video editting for producing The Adventures Of Running Nerd and arranged my first visit. Except for telephone tag, there were no problems.

• 2003/05/21. This was my first visit. Matt helped me get started transfering my Hi-8 camcorder footage to DV (Digital Video) tape. I needed to use 2 63-minute tapes.
  • The second tape was not rewound and ran out, so I needed to rewind it and my camcorder and transfer again.

• 2003/05/23. Matt helped me start capturing video clips from the DV tapes into Adobe Premiere running in their CTM Black Computer, but we were delayed by several problems.
  • The strangest one was the computer's video monitor. It's video cable appeared to have multiple bad connections causing missing colors. While Matt tried various positions of the video cable, I saw every possible combination of colors, as if all three of the cable wires that carried the red (R), green (G), and blue (B) signals had intermittant connections.

      RGB  Description
      ---  -------------
      000  No colors working.  Screen is completely black.
      001  Blue only.
      010  Green only.
      011  Green and Blue only.
      100  Red only.
      101  Red and Blue only.
      110  Red and Green only.
      111  All colors working.  Screen appears normal.
    

    Eventually he found a position in which the screen appeared normal.

• 2003/05/27. I went in to capture more video clips.
  • The CTM Black Computer, had been moved to a new location and it had some problems.
    • The CD drive did not work, but I did not need that immediately.
    • A removable hard disk they tried to install for me to which I could capture my clips would not work. So Tom had attached an external firewire hard disk for me to use.
  • I tried capturing more video clips from the DV tape player, but a Dialog box appeared stating: "Capture device is not availabe." After a while I got Matt. After he reseated it's FireWire cable and power cycled the DV player, things worked again.

• 2003/05/29. I went in to capture more video clips. There were no problems.

• 2003/06/02. I went in to capture more video clips.
  • The DV tape player had been removed from the CTM Black Computer. I waited until Matt set it up for me.
  • I learned that Adobe Premiere does not always capture all video frames. It detected dropped frames in my clips, but it did not report them at capture time. I began checking for them by displaying each clip's Properties. I learned that 6 clips that I captured had single dropped frames, so I needed to recaptured them.
  • I noticed that one of the clips that I captured had bad data, video from a previous recording had not been overrecorded. Apparently recording was temporarilly disabled during the transfer from my Hi-8 tape to the DV tape. I decided that I did not need any footage from that section.

• 2003/06/04. I went in to capture more video clips.
  • The CTM Black Computer and the external hard disk were gone. I waited while Tom brought in the disk, and Matt set me up to capture to it on his laptop computer.
  • I captured more video, but there were 5 more clips with dropped frames. Some clips had multiple dropped frames. So I recaptured them.

  I completed capture of all the clips that I wanted for my video.

• 2003/06/09. I created the video title, and prepared the capture of narration audio using the computer's microphone. There were no problems.

• 2003/06/11. I went in to capture narration audio.
  • I needed to do some hardware setup because some cables had been moved.
  • While I was working, the computer rebooted for no apparent reason.
  • Adobe Premiere encountered an error and needed to close.
  • When I reopened my project with Adobe Premiere, the computer seemed to try to reboot again before completing the open. But it could not read from the hard disk. I found Matt and he came out to help. He and I jiggled some cables got the computer to work again, though it seemed to do a recovery procedure on drive c: first.

• 2003/06/13
  • The microphone and headphones had been removed from the CTM Black Computer. So I needed to find some other ones.
  • I was delayed while finding and restoring some microphone settings that had changed.
  • I was capturing narration into the computer's microphone while playing/previewing the associated video. But the video repeatedly seemed to go into a single frame step mode for a few seconds each, destroying synchronization between the video and the narration.

• 2003/06/18
  • No sound came from the speakers. I discovered that the playback audio device had been changed. I restored it to the SoundBlaster hardware.
  • Although the speakers were working again, Adobe Premiere would play no sound. This problem eventually disappeared by itself.
  • Tom said that he copied my files to a folder on drive c: because his removable FireWire drive might not be available soon. Because of the CTM Black Computer's internal disk problems, I wanted to backup my (.ppg) project file to a floppy diskette. So I decided to format a diskette.
    • The first diskette would not format.
    • I tried a second one. It formatted very slowly at the end of the disk. It finished, but 20K bytes were marked used/bad.
    I saved my project on it and checked it. It seemed okay.
  • While I was there, Tom was replacing a disk controller that went bad in another computer after only 2 years. He said that he had never seen this happen before.

• 2003/06/20.
  • I had been bringing Roscoed9, my laptop computer, on which I recorded notes of my work. Suddenly it's display went grey. Next it went black, and a small amount of white smoke rose from it. I turned off the power. I turned it on again shortly after. It powered up okay, but the display had become much dimmer, especially on the left side. I could no longer read it without using eye glasses.

• 2003/06/23
  • One of my title files disappeared. I needed to recreate it.
  • I discovered that a video (.avi) file had a bad spot that I had not seen before. Properties showed that it had no dropped frames during capture.
  • Some very weird things happened, including:
    • the mouse became nonresponsive at times.
    • the Adobe Premiere Timeline edit point moved on it's own.
    • the video Timeline time scale changed on it's own.

• 2003/06/25
  • Deryl was having difficulty removing a stuck CD drive in a different computer. I helped him get it out.
  • People were making a lot of noise working on the air conditioning system, so I was not able to record narration audio.
  • My laptop display, already dim after the earlier smoke event, began flickering. The flickering eventually stopped.

• 2003/06/27
  • My laptop computer display did more flickering.
  • The CTM Black Computer's mouse cursor was very jerky. It made work difficult. It often acted as if the mouse was jammed, but I found nothing mechanically wrong with it when I opened and examined it.

• 2003/06/30
  • I did not go in today because I was told that the CTM Black Computer's registry had been corrupted and needed fixing.

• 2003/07/01
  • There were more mouse problems.
    • Mouse cursor jerkiness.
    • What I call "mouse fencing", in which the cursor seems to be blocked from crossing an invisible horizontal or vertical line. I saw mouse fencing in all 4 orthoginal directions.
    Again, the mouse mechanism seemed to move freely.
  • Sometimes the mouse cursor moved fine, but the edit line in Adobe Premiere's Timeline was jerky responding to it. This jerkiness seemed random, unrelated to the video content.
  • For a while I could not find some of my clips in Adobe Premiere's Project window and Timeline window. The difficulty was caused by overscrolling. These windows were scrolling more than a window full when I scrolled them by clicking in their scroll bars between the box and the arrow buttons. So some clips never appeared in the window. I needed to learn to scroll these windows using slower methods.

• 2003/07/07
  • The CTM Black Computer's mouse was missing. Deryl loaned me an optical USB mouse from a different computer. It worked okay.
  • The new mouse worked smoothly, but the response to it of Adobe Premiere's Timeline edit point continued to be jerky.
  • I worked on my video's credits. But the commands to center text were not working.

• 2003/07/09.
  • Because I was concerned about the reliability of the CTM Black Computer's hard drive c:, I asked that a hard drive that I owned be installed in the CTM Black Computer that I could use for backup. Tom said that it was okay and installed it, but not without many problems.
    • He tried to install it in a removable drive bay. But it would not work. It appeared that the drive bay's power connection was not working. So he installed the drive internally.
    • After being installed internally, the computer recognized the drive, but tried to boot off it.
    • Tom spent time trying to find jumper documentation for the drives.
    • He could not get it to operate as a slave on the primary disk controller. The computer kept trying to boot off it.
    • Eventually he installed it as a master on the secondary disk controller. That worked. He partitioned the drive.
    • When he began to format the drive, the computer rebooted. He restarted Windows and the format, and it finally finished. I was able to to backup my files to it.

• 2003/07/11
  • The CTM Black Computer was in use, so I could not use it immediately. Fortunately I was able to spend some of that time preparing to search the music library for background music.
  • I worked on the video's credits. I was using the AdobeTitleEditor Title/Size command. But it would not always change all the text that I highlighted. At first, whole sections were an incorrect size. Eventually only 2 bits of text had incorrect size:
    • the "nec" in the word "necessarilly";
    • the "un" in the word "Running".
    I was unable to fix these 2 remaining problems. They later mysteriously disappeared.

• 2003/07/15.
  • The CTM Black Computer was in use, so I could not use that.
  • The Control room was in use, so I could not search the music library.
  So I signed out a Canon GL1 digital camcorder for some work at home.

• 2003/07/16.
  • I tried to use the Canon GL1 digital camcorder that I had borrowed to shoot some video at home about how I constructed the Helmet Cam used in The Adventures Of Running Nerd. I tried to add the new shots in the space remaining on the second DV tape to which I had transfered my Hi-8 footage on 2003/05/21. But I could not record more than a few seconds. The cassette seemed to be jamming, but strangely. I tried rewinding and fast forwarding, but it jammed in exactly the same spot. Eventually I got another tape from Chelmsford TeleMedia and used that.
  • After doing the recordings, I went back into to Chelmsford TeleMedia to capture them into the CTM Black Computer. But I received the following message:

      DV Device Control 2.0.
      The DV device is unavailable for device control.
    

    Several people tried to help me get it working, switching connections, power cycling, restarting Windows, and checking settings, but nothing worked. Eventually I gave up and went home.

• 2003/07/20
  • The CTM Black Computer's display was dark at first, but it eventually began working.
  • When I tried to open my video project, Adobe Premiere encountered an error and needed to close. I tried again but got the same error. So I did a Windows restart. After that the project opened.
  • I set up up a JVC DV tape deck to use to capture the recording that I had done recently at home.
    • There were many audio drop outs. Fortunately I did not plan to use any of the audio, only the video.
    • At one point, the capture command stopped working. A message displayed said:

        The capture device is not available.
      

      Matt came and changed some settings and it began working again.
  • I also wanted to capture some footage from an existing Chelmsford TeleMedia program that was in a different tape format. Matt borrowed an appropriate tape deck from the broadcast center for me to use.
    • At first the deck spit out the tape cassette, but later it took it.
    • Next a message was displayed:

        The DV device is unavailable for device control.
      

      Matt borrowed another tape deck. This one worked and I was able to capture the footage I wanted.

• 2003/07/21.
  • When I arrived Tom was working on one of the digital video tape decks that Matt and I had borrowed yesterday. Tom said that it could not be fixed. I assume that it was the one that would not work for me yesterday.
  • My files and disk drive has been moved from the CTM Black Computer, which had no CD-ROM drive, to a newer computer which we called the CTM White Computer, which had 2 CD drives. I needed a CD drive to import music from the music library CDs. But neither drive worked completely.
    • One read and played music, but it was as noisy as a barber's electric hair clippers.
    • The other drive was quiet, but could not play music without skipping.
  • But the condition of the CD drives did not matter, because software needed to convert the CDA files on a CD to a form usable by Adobe Premiere was not on the computer. So I could not import any music.
  • While I was using the new computer, it's Windows XP user interface went away. I needed to restart it.
  • When I prepared to do narration audio capture using the microphone channel on the new computer, I discovered that it was very noisy. It was especially loud when I moved the mouse or did Windows minimizing and restoring. So I did not do any narration capture.
  • Artifacts remained in the Adobe Premiere Monitor window after I move another window off of it.
  • Some files that I had captured yesterday into the CTM Black Computer had been stored in the wrong folder, so were not copied to the CTM White Computer.
  • Tom tried to copy those remaining files over the network. But some of those files had disk sector errors. He did something with the IDE disk Master/Slave configurations and was eventually able to do the copying.
  • Tom also installed another CD-ROM drive on the CTM Black Computer, and tried to read and convert some music from CD there, using a program called SoundForge. But it would not work and he eventually gave up.

• 2003/07/31.
  • I needed to find headphones for the CTM White Computer.
  • While I was working, one of the other volunteers there turned off a power strip, turning off both the CTM White Computer and my laptop computer. So I needed to restart them.
  • Noise continued in the computer's microphone circuit, so I could not do narration audio capture.
  • The CTM White Computer stopped responding. I needed to restart it again.
  • That volunteer turned off my computers again. She almost cried. I do not think that it was intentional. I restarted the computers again.
  • My laptop computer glitched and I lost some of my notes.

• 2003/08/01.
  • When I arrived at Chelmsford TeleMedia it's doorbell was sounding, and the staff was trying to silence it. They removed the batteries that powered a doorbell button transmitter, but that did not help. I went to the CTM White Computer and began working. The doorbell was distracting, but it eventually stopped.

• 2003/08/04.
  • When I arrived I discovered that the electric power had failed. The backup generator was supposed to start automaticly, but it had not. Mike said that power failed 15 minutes before I arrived. After another 10 or 15 minutes the backup generator started.
  • I demonstrated for Tom the noise problem with the CTM White Computer's microphone circuit. He said that he did not think that he could fix it. This meant that I could not record narration audio directly into the computer and needed to make other plans.
  • There was annoying horizontal jitter in the CTM White Computer's video display. It seemed to happen when the air contitioner was running. This was odd because the computer was on a UPS (Uninterruptable Power Supply). The jitter was 1 or 2 pixels wide. It seemed at first to be associated with only the Adobe Premiere window. But later it was associated with the Premiere Help window also.

• 2003/08/06.
  • When I arrived at Chelmsford TeleMedia, I learned that their Internet connection was not working. Pete said that it has been down since the power failure. So I could not, as planned, download a music conversion program that I needed. So I found some other work to do.
  • Adobe Premiere encountered an error and needed to close, 2 times.

• 2003/08/08.
  • The Internet connection was working today, so I tried downloading CDex, a music conversion program. The file resulting from the first download was truncated, meaning that the last part of the file was missing. I tried downloading a second time and that worked.
  • The CDex install complained of a missing dll file. I accepted an alternative, which seemed to work. I used CDex and a CD drive on the CTM White Computer, to read and convert the music that I needed.
  • I used the Windows Media Player to play and organize those music files, but I kept becoming confused about the file names, as if the Windows Media Player was not displaying the correct file names.

• 2003/08/11.
  • I was doing a lot of scrub previewing with Adobe Premiere. This is dragging the Timeline cursor left or right while watching the video in the monitor window. But the video displayed there was jerky and difficult to watch. There were excessive and random pauses, some as long as 1 second. So I pressed <Ctrl-Alt-Del> to display the WindowsTaskManager/Processes to monitor the CPU usage by process while scrubbing. At first when I did this, the jerkiness stopped. But it returned later. The CPU usage was low during the video jerkiness, indicating that it was not caused by a CPU overload. It was not cause by disk delays either, because the disk is cached, and the jerkiness happened while scrubbing back and forth over sections of the video Timeline that were only a few second long.
  • I again experienced overscrolling in the Adobe Premiere Project and Timeline windows.

• 2003/08/12.
  • The horizontal jitter in the video display was back.
  • I tried exporting a countdown leader to DV tape in a Canon XL1 camcorder in preparation for some work at home. At first, the sound recorded, but not the video. After I rendered the countdown, I was able to export the video also.
  • I had various problems and delays with the camcorder.
  • I was holding down the left and right arrow keys to single step a transition in my video. The transition had been fully rendered. But the video in the Monitor window was jerky. It did not show every frame. I said out loud that it should not be missing frames. After that it was fine and showed every frame, in both directions, but only for about 10 seconds. After that it began skipping frames again. I ran the WindowsTaskManager and saw that the CPU usage was only 30% while doing this. So it appeared that something was interfering with Monitor window updating.

• 2003/08/13.
  • At home I spent approximately 1 hour rerecording some video using an XL1 camcorder that I had borrowed. Later, back at Chelmsford TeleMedia, the CTM White Computer would not recognize the XL1 camcorder on the FireWire cable. Deryl physically removed the FireWire interface board, restarted the computer, put the board back in, and restarted again. After that the XL1 camcorder was recognized and I captured the new footage.
  • When I opened my project in Adobe Premiere, my Timeline window was in the wrong place. I put it back.
  • Next I had trouble finding the Timeline edit line. Eventually I found it and began editing.
  • Adobe Premiere stopped producing audio output. Deryl said that he had this problem before, but was not certain how he made it go away. He got my audio to return by logging in to Windows again.
  • The audio disappeared again. I tried repeating Deryl's solution, but it did not work for me. Finally I discovered that the problem was caused by the AudioMixer/MasterFader volume being set to minimum. I do not know how that fader setting was changed.

• 2003/08/14.
  • I had begun staying late at Chelmsford TeleMedia to work, and had brought supper. When I tried to heat it in their microwave oven, the circuit breaker in a power strip popped. I needed to cook longer using a lower power setting.
  • I discovered an unexplained drop in volume in one of my clips which I needed to correct.
  • Adobe Premiere's AudioMixer/MasterFader, which displays the overall audio level, disappeared. This happened 3 times. Each time, to make it reappear, I needed to disable, and reenable, it's display.
  • Today the dialog box which normally appears to report that an attached FireWire device has been detected, and allows an action selection, did not appear. The dialog box had opened, but behind Adobe Premiere's window. I found it when I noticed that a TaskBar button for it had appeared, in blue instead of the usual grey.

• 2003/08/19.
  • Mike turned off the CTM White Computer moments before I arrived, because the room was warm. So I needed to restart it.
  • Adobe Premiere's ability to replace a video transition, by dragging and dropping a new one on top of the old one, stopped working. Now it either inserts the transition, or does nothing. Now to replace a transition, the old one must be deleted first.
  • Adobe Premiere's ability to show the video content of a clip in the Monitor window, while using the mouse to adjust the clip's OutPoint, stopped working.

• 2003/08/20. There were no problems.

• 2003/08/21.
  • Another video clip file seemed to have developed a glitch, with both missing video and audio. But it's Properties list indicated no dropped frames.
  • The FireWire dialog box was opening behind the Adobe Premiere window again.
  • A strange hiss appeared in the computer's audio, unless I Muted the Microphone or decreased the volume. But the noise from mouse movement and the windows Minimize/Restore commands that I described earlier remained, was unaffected by any controls.
  • While using the Adobe Title Designer for the credits.
    • The WordWrap feature failed.
    • When I closed the title file, Adobe Premiere needed to shut down.
    • After I restarted, the centering of the text was lost, but I was able to recenter it. Also WordWrap began working again.
  • When I tried using the Adobe MPEG Encoder to do a video export test, it would not work. A dialog box stated that the encoder needed activation before use. Something had deactivated it, because it had worked in an earlier test. So I was unable to MPEG encode this day.

• 2003/08/22.
  • I got the MPEG encoder to run. The Internet was working and the encoder was able to get what it needed from the Internet to reactivate itself.
  • While reading Adobe Premiere's Help pages, I discovered that some of the italic characters displayed were bad. It appeared that a font had been corrupted, because those characters were corrupted in exactly the same way regardless of where in the page they appeared. Some of the letters seemed to have their lower parts shifted left. But it was not all the letters, and some had multiple shifts on different levels.
  • There was also some black/white video noise, not associated with the italics problem.
  • In a seperate very short video project, I worked on a modified countdown leader. But I had many problems.
    • For some reason I could not scrub preview it, whether I rendered it or not.
    • When I tried to export it, the export ran very slowly. It seemed stuck.
    • So I pressed <Ctrl-Alt-Del> to try to display the WindowsTaskManager/Processes to monitor the CPU usage. But the window showed only limited information, unlike before. It was basicly useless.
    • The CTM White Computer became nonresponsive. I power cycled it to restart it.
    • I tried exporting again. This time it worked, but it required much longer than the estimated 2 minutes to finish. It paused many times for many seconds each.

• 2003/08/25.
  • At home, I used my new Daewoo DVDS151 DVD player to view some of the video that I had exported to MPEG1 format and burned on a CD. But there were many problems:
    • My DVD player thought that the length was 33m53s. The actual length was 29m55s.
    • The video motion seemed jerky in places. Single frame stepping showed that some frames were missing or duplicated. Usually it was only one frame, but sometimes 2 in a row. These seemed to happen in random places, regardless of content, including at places where little was changing or moving, such as in the countdown leader, and the slowly rolling credits at the end.
  • While driving to Chelmsford TeleMedia, I became lost after following a detour around sewer contruction.
  • I worked on the modified countdown leader which used RGB difference keying. I had replaced one of the colors with a red. But 2 slightly different reds appeared in different places in the clip. One satisfied the RGB difference keying, but the other did not. The same thing happened when I tried it again with blue. I needed to cover up the frames containing the odd colors to prevent incorrect keying.

• 2003/08/27.
  • At home I watched, on my DVD player, an MPEG2 Encoding that I had done a few days earlier.
    • Some of the problems with missing and duplicated frames were gone, but not all of them.
    • Strangly, the resolution was worse than the earlier MPEG1 encodes, though the MPEG2 file was approximately twice as long, with supposedly twice the data rate.

• 2003/08/27. There were no problems.

• 2003/08/28. This was the day that I exported a rough cut to DV tape for Matt to watch. There were no problems.

• 2003/09/02.
  • Matt had suggested that the narration audio in my video had some problems, and suggested that I take home a digital camcorder and one of the studio microphones and rerecord it. This is what I did, but I had the following problems:
    • The microphone seemed to be picking up louder than normal sounds of vehicles passing outside.
    • The Auto and Manual positions for the camera's audio gain control did not seem to behave any differently. So I used manual.
    • I was using my DVD player to watch my video and hear the narration that needed to be rerecorded. But it was having some new problems.
      • Pressing play after pause caused a momentary loss of brightness a second after the press.
      • Sometimes a checkerboard pattern appeared momentarilly.
    • I felt a sharp pain where the lapel microphone touched me. It felt similar to a needle or an electrical shock.

• 2003/09/03.
  • In the morning I continued recording.
    • At some point I noticed that the audio level seemed to have changed. It was high, and sounded slightly distorted. But the control was the same level that I used the previous night. I lowered it and continued recording. Later I noticed that it seemed to have changed again.

• 2003/09/04.
  • Adobe Premiere was acting strangely. It eventually became non responsive. I restarted it.
  • I began capturing the narration that I had finished recording the previous day. At first I heard strange clicking sounds, but these disappeared.
  • I noticed that one of my video clips had developed an annoying base note. Fortunately I did not need it's audio.
  • Adobe Premiere encountered an error and needed to close. I lost all the audio clips that I had imported into my project. But the clip files themselves remained on the disk, so I was able to reimport them into the project from there.
  • I began capturing audio clips again, but after only one clip, I lost sound. I got the sound back after I closed and reopened the Capture window.
  • I placed some of the new audio clips into the Timeline and listened to them.
    • The audio levels seem to be changing for no apparent reason.
    • At one point in one of the clips, the audio level exceeded the 0 dB limit according to the level indicator. But the audio there did not sound loud, and I examined it's waveform, and it looked okay.
    • I played the clip repeatly. Usually the 0 dB limit was exceeded, but a few times it was not. This indicated that something was dynamicly interfering with the clip, or with the level indicator.
  • At one point, the mouse cursor jumped to the upper left corner of the display. This was a Logitech Optical Mouse.
  • I lost all of my video and audio renderings, except for 5 seconds of black video near the beginning. First the audio went, next the video went.

• 2003/09/05.
  • While editing, I noticed a new noise spike near the boundary between two video clips. I was able to edit it out, deleting only ~1 second.

• 2003/09/08.
  • I noticed numerious minor digital video glitches that I had not noticed before
  • I needed to do a lot of audio level adjustments, more than I had thought were needed. Sections that sounded okay before no longer sounded okay.
  • Both of the 2 CD drives on the CTM White Computer, including one that was a CD burner, stopped working. So I could no longer burn any exported MPEG files to view on my DVD player.

• 2003/09/09.
  • I did more audio mixing.
    • For some unknown reason, I again lost all my video renderings.
    • The mouse cursor jumped again, this time to near the lower left of the display.

• 2003/09/10
  • Adobe Premiere stopped responding. I needed to restart Windows.
  • During playback and audio mixing, I again noticed strange behavior in the AudioMixer level indicators. Unlike previous days, today the pattern of movement on the level indicator for a particular clip was repeatable. This time, the problem was that the position on the level indicator did not match the instantanious clip volume.
    • Two parts of the same clip that sounded the same volume had very different levels shown on it's level indicator.
    • If I adjusted the volume of different parts of a clip to have the same peak volume on it's level indicator, then they did not sound the same volume.
  • There was hypersensitivity in the clip audio level rubberband controls in the Timeline window. Changing the level there by a fraction of a dB changed the audio output level and the AudioMixer level indicator by multiple dBs, making getting the desired level impossible.
  • Also, parts of my narration audio, which were all recorded with the same microphone and digital camcorder, and sounded okay immediately after being recorded, now had problems. Some of them now sound muffled and distorted. In some places, the high frequencies, such as the s sounds, were lost. In some places, it was difficult to understand what I had said.

• 2003/09/11.
  • I had adjusted the audio levels the best that I could in spite of the difficulties I had had. So today, I exported my entire 30 minute video The Adventures Of Running Nerd to DV tape. This would be the tape that Chelmsford TeleMedia would use to cablecast in town. There were no problems.

• At this point the video production is done, and I am concerned mainly with distribution. The purpose of most of the computer work that follows is to produce an MPEG encode of the video with which I can produce a DVD playable VCD version.

• 2003/09/12
  • I tried to export my entire video to another DV tape to make a backup copy. But the export stopped for some unknown reason 3 minutes from the end, so I needed to rewind the tape and do it again.
  • Matt burned a copy of the earlier DV tape to a DVD-R disc for me.
    • When I tried to play the disc at home on my new DVD player, it's door would not open at first. It acted jammed. Eventually it opened.
    • The disc that Matt burned played nothing but black.
    • Back at Chelmsford TeleMedia it played black in one of their DVD players also. So Matt burned another DVD-R disc in a different burner. We tested it there and it worked. But when I came home and played it in my DVD player, it showed hundreds of small problems, such as: brief audio drop outs, video glitches, and momentary pauses. The glitches seemed to happen in the same places each time the disc was played, indicating defects on the disc, but visual inspection showed no defects.
  • Though that DVD-R disc seemed flawed, I tried to make a copy of it onto a VHS tape. The first tape that I tried jammed. The next tape worked.

• 2003/09/22.
  • Because the CD drives in the CTM White Computer no longer worked, I could not burn CDs there with test MPEG encodes of my video. I needed to arrange to transfer the files over the network to Pete's Mac computer and burn them on his CD drive. I did this only once.

• 2003/09/23.
  • I tried showing my video from the DVD-R for some friends where there was a GE DVD player. At first it was fine, without any of the glitches that appeared when using my DVD player. But after 10 minutes problems appeared.
    • It began going silent and black momentarilly.
    • These pauses became longer, and severe video breakup began appearing.
    • Eventually it became unwatchable.
    So I switched to a VHS tape copy to show the remainder of the video. Of course, it had the many minor glitches from my DVD player.

• 2003/09/24.
  • I was informed that delivery of the new CTM Dell Computer, which was supposed to replace the CTM White Computer as my main video workstation, had been delayed until the end of the month.
  • This evening was supposed to be the premiere of my video, The Adventures Of Running Nerd, on the local cable TV channel. But when it's time arrived, the channel was black for the first 10 or 15 minutes. Only the last half of the video was shown. And I suspect that most viewers had changed channels.

• 2003/09/25
  • I thought that corruption of the settings files used by the Adobe MPEG Encoder might be the cause of the poor encodes that I had been getting. The Adobe Premiere install disc could not be found. So I tried copying the setting files from another computer. But the MPEG encodes did not improve.

• 2003/09/26
  • The new CTM Dell Computer arrived unexpectedly. But I was not able to use it for my work because the ethernet local area network that I needed to copy my files to it was not working.

• 2003/10/01. This was a very bad day.
  • On arrival I discovered that the main LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) of my laptop computer had become much worse. It appeared that it had spung an internal leak. A large area in the upper right corner was a rainbow of colors, so much of the display was useless.
  • The ethernet local area network was not working again. So at first I was not able to copy my files to the CTM Dell Computer. But Deryl set up a network segment between the 2 computers using a FireWire cable. It seemed to work very well.
  • After I began using the FireWire network connection, the regular ethernet network began working again, and I began to use it. But later it slowed down so much that simply viewing a remote shared directory required almost an entire minute.
  • After I copied my files, I tried loading my video project into Adobe Premiere on the CTM Dell Computer, and tried previewing it. I noticed several differences. Some of these differences might have been because of software versions.
    • The CTM White Computer used Adobe Premiere v6.5.
    • The CTM Dell Computer used Adobe Premiere Pro v7.0.
    Here are some of the things that I noticed.
    • Good things.
      • The Timeline window does not have the horizontal overscroll problem of the previous version.
      • Using the mouse on various controls while previewing does not stop the preview as it did in the previous version.
      • Preview Scrubbing is smooth. It is no longer jerky as in the previous version.
      • Fades in and out in the credits work okay without manually rendering, which was necessary in the previous version.
    • Bad things.
      • Project importation problems that needed fixing.
        • My opening title and credits typefaces were incorrect.
        • Two of the transitions were missing [both Motion/Motion]. A different third transition was working okay.
        • I used several FreezeFrames in my video. These did not work in the new version.
        • The audio levels seemed to have changed. The narration needed to be louder, or the music needed to be softer.
      • There were graphical user interface problems. This was not a shortage of CPU cycles according to the WindowsTaskManager/Processes window.
        • The video playing in the Monitor window while previewing was jerky. The CPU Usage was only 7%.
        • When dragging the Timeline window's hozizontal scroll bar, the Timeline ruler was not updated until the mouse stopped. CPU Usage was only 30% maximum.
        • Windows dragging, which at first was very smooth, later became slightly jerky. CPU Usage was only 30% maximum.
  • The Adventures Of Running Nerd was cablecast tonight. It seemed okay. But a major baseball playoff game involving the local team, the Boston Red Sox, was on the same night. And earlier, the local newspaper, the Lowell Sun, reported in a front page headline, Guantanamo suspect had Chelmsford address recently, that a man recently arrested at Logan airport on suspicion of espionage related to terrorism had been living in town. So I doubt that many people saw my video on TV that night.

• From this point on, unless stated otherwise, all comments apply to the new CTM Dell Computer and Adobe Premiere Pro v7.0. At first the new system seemed to operate much better. But within a few days it was acting almost as weird as the older systems.

• 2003/10/02.
  • The mouse cursor became nonresponsive, several times, for 2-3 seconds each.

• 2003/10/06
  • Video transitions do not open and demonstrate themselves as they did in Adobe Premiere v6.5. They need to be placed in the Timeline to see what they do.
  • One time when I tried to view the AudioMixer window, it was placed almost completely out of site, off the Adobe Premiere window.
  • When I set the AudioMixer to display all tracks, I was unable to see any but T1 and the master track. To see the others I needed to manually enlarge the window.

• 2003/10/08.
  • After working perfectly the first day, the optical mouse on the new CTM Dell Computer, began malfunctioning.
    • Sometimes I moved the mouse but the mouse cursor would not move.
    • Sometimes the mouse cursor jumped to a distant location on the display, sometimes to the other other monitor. This computer had 2 video monitors.
  • The Adventures Of Running Nerd was cablecast tonight. It seemed okay. But again a major Red Sox baseball playoff game happened the same evening, this time a stage 2 game against the New York Yankees. So I doubt that many people watched my video.

• 2003/10/09.
  • My Sony CDDTR716 camcorder malfunctioned. I was thinking of using this in another project. When I played the tape through the viewfinder, or to the external video out cable, I saw white, decaying, aperiodic, horizontal noise lines. The camera is only on it's 8th cassette, so wear or dirt is unlikely. When I tried to demonstrate this camcorder problem to Matt, the noise was gone. But it came back later.
  • The Adobe Premiere Pro v7.0 AudioMixer showed some of the same strange behavior of levels as in v6.5. The indicated levels fluctuate much more than the actual audio.

• 2003/10/10.
  • The mouse cursor on the CTM Dell Computer is not jerky as on the CTM White Computer. But it is doing something different. The distance the mouse cursor moves per inch of mouse movement is not constant, both horizontally and vertically. This causes the mouse cursor to overshoot or undershoot my target.
  • The feedback from the Timeline Rubberband line movement tool is poor compared to that of Adobe Premiere v6.5. The rubberband does not change appearance when the mouse button is pressed. It does not change until the mouse moves a significant distance, from where it must often be moved back.
  • The KeyFrame/RubberBand display in the Timeline window sometimes disappears while scrolling the Timeline while previewing. But the CPU Usage is only 25%.
  • Adobe Premiere Pro v7.0 encountered an error and needed to close. I thought it was doing autosaves, but I guess not. I lost 3 hours of work.
  • Until today, sound always worked during preview scrubbing. Today the sound worked sometimes, but not always.
  • I was trying to fix the font sizes in the credits using the AdobeTitleDesigner/ObjectStyle/Properties/FontSize command drag control and the mouse. But the control became unusable. The size value jumped around wildly, and there were long delays. I gave up and entered font sizes using the keyboard.

• 2003/10/15.
  • I needed to push the Chelmsford TeleMedia doorbell 3 times to be let in. Usually once is enough.
  • The CTM Dell Computer took a long time to display the MyComputer folder, maybe 30 seconds.
  • My video project took a long time to load into Adobe Premiere.
  • Work was interrupted and delayed while the electric power failed, the backup generator started, the computer was restarted, and my project was reloaded.
  • The mouse cursor was jumping around the display again.
  • The DVD drive glitched while I was burning some MPEG files onto a CD.
  • The Adventures Of Running Nerd was supposed to be cablecast tonight, but was not. There was only black. Other programs were missing also, maybe because of the earlier power failure.

• 2003/10/17. There were no problems. But the only things I tried to do were an MPEG encode and reading documentation.

• 2003/10/20.
  • There were no problems at CTM, but
  • later I was working as a volunteer camera operator during coverage of a town meeting. One of the microphone circuits went crazy, causing weird feedback that disrupted the meeting until a replacement was used.

• 2003/10/22.
  • I tried to use the Shuttle control in Adobe Premiere's Monitor window. But it skipped approximately 40 frames when the direction reversed, making it difficult to position the video using that control.
  • The Adventures Of Running Nerd was cablecast tonight. The video seemed okay, but there were audio dropouts througout. The next day the DV tape was test played in the same tape player. This time it had both audio and video problems. The tape played okay in a different player.

• 2003/10/29.
  • I tried to copy and paste some text from a Help window to my text notes file. To highlight the text, I pressed and held the left mouse button and dragged the mouse down to highlight the lines that I wanted. When the mouse cursor reached the bottom of the window, it was supposed to scroll the text up while continuing to highlight. It did this, but so slowly that I gave up and copied the text in a different way.
  • The property effect knobs in Adobe Premiere's AudioMixer were behaving erraticly. Dragging the mouse cursor over a knob is supposed to turn the knob. But
    • sometimes dragging horizontally moved the knob and dragging vertically did nothing; and
    • at other times dragging vertically moved the knob and dragging horizontally did nothing;
    for the same knob. The needed direction seemed to be random.

• 2003/10/31.
  • The AudioMixer effect knob problem continued, but with a twist. The mouse cursor disappeared when I dragged over the control. The cursor reappeared before I went home.
  • I needed to fix some font size and typeface problems that had appeared in the rolling credits title. But the Adobe TitleDesigner was giving me problems. So I created a small test title file with which I could experiment. I noted the following problems.
    • The History window, which displays previous program states, and allows undoing multiple commands with a single mouse click, was not working.
    • The Title/Position/HorizontalCenter command did not center, though it did move objects horizontally an unpredictable amount.
    • The ObjectStyle/FontSize drag control behaved in another different way. Font size would increase most rapidly when the mouse cursor was dragged 45 degrees counterclockwize from the horizontal, or the 1:30 o'clock direction. Minimum/no effect happened when the mouse cursor was dragged 135 degrees counterclockwize from the horizontal, or the 10:30 o'clock direction.
    • Object selection was weird. The <Ctrl> and <Shift> keys did not work in the usual way, making multiple object selection difficult.
    • I was using ObjectStyle/Font/CourierNew. But for FontSize 71, Regular style was 2/15 taller and wider than Bold style. This made column alignment impossible if these styles were mixed.
  • The mouse cursor was jumping around again.
  • Because of the problems with my laptop computer, I had begun recording my notes with the Windows Notepad text editor on the CTM Dell Computer and transporting them home on floppy disk. But today Notepad began acting strange. Sometimes when I tried to insert text, it was as if the text cursor would move immediately before I pressed a keyboard key. Editing was practically impossible.

• 2003/11/03.
  • When I loaded my project file into Adobe Premiere, the progress bar went almost all the way across in the first 2 seconds, and sat there for another 10 seconds before the load finished.
  • The Notepad editor problem continued.
  • The Adobe TitleDesigner WordWrap feature failed. It broke words in the middle.
  • The Monitor window became jerky again.
  • The Shuttle control on the Monitor window was skipping again when the direction reversed, but this time it skipped only 8 frames, and it waited approximately 1 second before responding.
  • The Adobe Premiere History window would not show all the possible undo states. There were undo states above it's top border. One was partially visible. But there was no scroll bar with which to scroll up. To see and access them, I needed to decrease the size of the window until a scroll bar appeared. I used the scroll bar to access those undo states.

• 2003/11/12. There were no problems.

• 2003/11/17.
  • The Notepad editor problem resumed.
  • I noticed more unexplainable response delays.
    • There were delays in response of Adobe Premiere to it's Monitor buttons,
      • 0.5 second to the Play button.
      • 0.2 second (6 of 30 frames/s) to the Stop button.
      But the button appearance changed immediately.
    • 25 seconds passed between the insertion of a DVD disk and the response dialog.
  • The Adobe Premiere File/Export command got stuck. I needed to terminate Adobe Premiere from the TaskManager. This happened twice.

• 2003/11/20.

  • The CTM Dell Computer DVD drive began making a lot of noise, though it continued to read discs.
  • The Notepad editor problem continued, but I learned how to work around it. By examining my text file in hexadecimal, I saw that in the problem places, line terminators, which are supposed to be <cr><lf> (Carriage Return following by Line Feed), instead were <cr>s without <lf>s or <lf>s without <cr>s. Replacing those bad line terminators with good ones allowed me to continue editing.

I could continue, because the problems did, but here is a good place to stop.

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Guantanamo suspect had Chelmsford address recently (Live Web Page: here)

[ This newspaper article is noteworthy because on the day when my video The Adventures Of Running Nerd finally appeared on Chelmsford cable TV without technical problems, this sensational story appeared, and probably eliminated what little viewership the video would have gotten. ]

October 01, 2003
Lowell, MA
Search Lowell

Article Last Updated: Wednesday, October 01, 2003 - 11:59:49 AM EST

Report: Guantanamo suspect had Chelmsford address recently
sun and news services report

WASHINGTON The Guantanamo Bay translator arrested at Logan Airport shared an
apartment with a couple in Chelmsford and was on leave from his job at a
Department of Defense contractor that has a branch office in Billerica.

The latest suspect was identified as Egyptian-American Ahmed Fathy Mehalba,
31.

The arrest of this second translator at the U.S. prison for terror suspects
is the third suspect now facing charges, raising new concerns about the
extent of possible espionage.

A Boston newspaper reported today that Mehalba shared an apartment with a
man and woman in a multiunit building in North Chelmsford. Neighbors said
FBI agents interviewed the couple for about an hour on Monday night.

Chelmsford police this morning confirmed an address for Mehalba at the three-
building Park Woods condominium complex at 136-140 Tyngsboro Road.

[picture: Ahmed Mehalba ... shared apartment]

One female resident of 138 Tyngsboro Road said neighbors in the complex are
not particularly close to each other. Neighbors tend to nod and wave to each
other, but mind their own business, she said.

The apartment complex is managed Riney Management Corp. on Fletcher Street
in Chelmsford.

Two neighbors this morning said there was a rumor that FBI agents had
questioned residents of one of the second-floor apartments. No one answered
the door this morning at that apartment.

Several neighbors said they hope it's not true, that they don't want that
kind of notoriety that close to their home.

Neighbors all spoke on condition of anonymity.

In October 2001, Chelmsford police went to the North Chelmsford address but
could not find him, said Sgt. Ronald Gamache. The Salem Police Department
had asked Chelmsford to relay a message asking Mehalba to contact them.

"The only reason we have an involvement is because we were sent out there by
Salem police to make a notification and his name was not even on the mailbox
so we don't know how legit his address is," Gamache said.

According to reports, Mehalba reportedly lived in Salem for several years
during the 1990s. In 1997, when records show he filed for bankruptcy, he
listed a Salem address.

Methuen police have also disclosed that Mehalba lived in an apartment on
Carroll Street in that community last year.

Defense Department officials said Mehalba worked at Guantanamo for San Diego-
based defense contractor Titan Corp. Titan spokesman Wil Williams confirmed
Mehalba worked for the firm but said he was on leave when the arrest
occurred.

Titan, which has an office on Technology Drive in Billerica, does extensive
work for the departments of defense and homeland security.

Mehalba is a civilian who formerly served in the Army and twice started but
failed to complete a military intelligence course to become an interrogator,
two defense officials said on condition of anonymity.

Mehalba was medically discharged from the Army in May 2001 and later hired
by a private defense contractor to be a translator at the prison in
Guantanamo Bay, they said.

Officials said they had no further information on why he didn't complete the
courses, nor what the medical discharge was for.

The arrest was the third involving someone who worked closely with the
largely Muslim, non-English-speaking population of about 660 suspected
terrorist fighters being held at Guantanamo. The two other men, another
translator and a Muslim chaplain, are both in the military.

Officials said they had been watching Mehalba and that still others were
being investigated. A new assessment team traveled to the prison this week
to study procedures and make recommendations on security, defense officials
said.

The arrest of a second translator raised new concern about how the military
had checked the dozens of translators needed to help with interrogations of
al-Qaida and Taliban suspects whose native languages include Arabic, Pashto,
Dari and Uighur.

At a brief hearing yesterday afternoon in U.S. District Court in Boston,
Mehalba entered no plea to a charge of making false statements and was
detained pending another hearing scheduled for Oct. 8. He could face up to
five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000 if convicted of the charge.

Mehalba, wearing jeans and an orange golf shirt, said nothing during the
hearing, except to tell the judge that he could not afford his own attorney.

Michael Andrews, the attorney who represented Mehalba at yesterday's
hearing, said, "He intends to vigorously defend himself against these
charges."

Mehalba was arrested at Logan after authorities found classified information
in his possession, officials said yesterday. Dennis Murphy, a spokesman for
the Department of Homeland Security, said Mehalba is a naturalized U.S.
citizen originally from Egypt who had flown Monday to Boston from Cairo,
with a stop in Milan, Italy.

He was carrying 132 compact discs, which he said contained only music and
videos, according to a government affidavit filed in court. But agents
checked his bags and found at least one that appeared to contain unspecified
classified information, some of it marked "SECRET," the affidavit said.

Mehalba denied knowing how the information got on the disc, saying he bought
the discs in Guantanamo "as blanks," the affidavit said.

Associated Press writer Denise Lavoie in Boston and Sun staff writer Jack
Minch contributed to this report.

© 1999-2003 MediaNews Group, Inc.
All rights to republication of special dispatches herein are reserved.

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