Burned by Midnight Oil

This post is going to be somewhat short, which I know will raise a question of why I’m posting at all. Well, I like to keep what few readers I have current, and there’s also the fact that I need to vent at people who might possibly understand my frustration.

You see, instead of that albeit lovely picture of an oil lamp, this was supposed to be the day I finally got around to posting my preview of Star Trek Online. I have a video supplement planned out and everything. However, it seems that my love for the Flash programming language, ActionScript, has once again proven to be a hindrance rather than a help.

I had programmed my video supplement as a slideshow of cropped screenshots, with narration and a bit of appropriate music. Very nice and tidy and all contained within a single frame in Flash. Relatively small and clean, should be no problem to convert to a video that can be uploaded to YouTube, right? Well, not exactly.

Turns out I can’t seem to get software to understand that there’s more content to the video than just that one frame of blank background – the photos load through the script, you see. So I went back and started hashing out the manual, timeline-based method of getting the video together. However, I ran out of time, and now am getting ready to head out for yet another busy day.

Why a video supplement? I know I need the practice at planning production times and working with various suites of software if I am to work on them on the future, which I might. I also felt the need to branch out beyond static text into more dynamic forms of media, hence my Netflix ‘podcasts’ and the attempt at a video with “Powerless,” which could have turned out a lot better. Practice makes perfect, as they say, and this is to be more practice for me.

Unfortunately, it will have to wait.