I gape, therefore I am

Gape- to goggle: look with amazement; look stupidly

That my friends, was me last Friday night. Let me tell you the story!

Every Friday night here up in the ME, Post assembles the end of the week show for the video classes. They hand in final projects by 4pm (which we try and color correct and audio mix before that time) and then we assemble amusing slates for the classes with appropriately saucy music, slam their pieces into the timeline, then push that baby out to tape. Easy enough, but some shows push an hour or more, so if anything screws up, things get a little tense. Also? No one hands in anything on time. Apparently, deadlines mean nothing in the film and video world.

(A side note- there are children upstairs for reasons I cannot explain, and they're doing their best to punch a hole in my ceiling. WTF? I want to blog and watch poker in peace!)

So anyway, I'm assembling the show on one of our house G5s. On the internal, partitioned drive. On a computer named Oliver Stone. I later learn Oliver is a right bastard for all his brilliance during Natural Born Killers, and he acts retardedly when called upon to do things of Minor Importance. Right. Anyway, while printing the show to tape, a frame drops, so I restart the print. It happens again. I swear. I start again. And again. Finally FCP crashes and I am informed of Oliver's petulance. I've been running the show from a backup from the Autosave Vault for awhile, so I decide to fish out the project I need and relabel it. I then drag it over to the partitioned drive and open up FCP. Hmm, all my media is missing. I stare at the screen for a moment and flip the finder on and browse the media drive.

My media folder is gone.

Let me repeat that. My. Media. Folder. IS GONE.

At that point I gape at the computer for a solid 30 seconds. I look at the FCP project file. I believe the name was the same as the media folder. But when I dropped it from the Autosave Vault over to the partioned drive, Mas OSX did not ask me if I wanted to replace it. (And if it did, I certainly didn't pay attention. My catatonic state could've wiped it from my memory too.) Fuck you Mac OS and Fuck Me. So the show that needs to go to tape soon (it's now 7pm and the show starts at 8 and oh yeah, the show is over an hour tonight) has suddenly disappeared.

Fuck me.

One of the other editors, being of sound mind and body, starts grabbing drives and reassembling the show on a computer not named Oliver Stone. I eventually snap out of my reaction to this horrible mistake I have made and help him with the order of the show and grab files from other computers. The show then goes off to tape.

Later that night I get sick off the food I ate at dinner. Karma? Maybe.

In reflection over this major gaff, I remember watching a friend of mine edit, and he put .whatever tags on all his file names. He didn't like that the MacOS didn't put them on. I thought this was a weird little thing to do, albeit with merit, but I had never done that (unless I needed to send a file to a PC computer). But, I have Learned! I name files with extensions now! Most of the time that is ;)