When I was in seminary I took a class that introduced me to video editing. This was around 15 years ago and the school had one computer in a large closet hooked up to what was called a "video toaster". It was a complex bit of machinery that was incredibly slow, but you could edit video tapes with professional looking transitions. Plus you could speed the action up or slow it down or run it backwards, which was a lot of fun when working with footage from youth events. I would lose track of time in that little room.
So later on, when I got my first PC, I also spent a bit of extra money on a "Dazzle" movie maker. It plugged in to the PC and converted video taped material into a digital format. And it came with software to then edit the movies on the computer. And then it was SUPPOSED to transmit the digital film back out onto a video tape. That's the part I could never get to work. I spent hours messing with that thing, plugging various cords into various holes and just couldn't get anything back out of my computer. And of course this was long before computers had the capability to crank out a DVD. So after who-knows-how-much money and who-knows-how-many hours, absolutely nothing ever came of the "Dazzle". (Turns out the term "Dazzle" was meant to be taken ironically.)
I was always going to give it another shot "someday"; thus it went into a box... until it was so outdated that it was entirely obsolete. So I finally threw it away.
The crazy thing is that now I've got a digital camcorder, and a program on a relatively new PC that could do just as much or more than that "Toaster", and hours of amusing footage of my own amusing kids, and you know how many videos I have edited? Yeah ... you guessed it.
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