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Saturday, May 21, 2011

Technology Work Arounds - and Why They Are Important

For those of you who are regular readers, you probably remember my post in mid-April regarding my faithful MacBook Pro that hit the floor of the San Diego airport and suffered a broken screen. As you may recall, the computer worked perfectly, but the screen was broken which left me with a rather hefty charge IF I chose to have it replaced. Rather than going through the expense of replacing a screen on a 5 year old laptop, I chose to buy a new MacBook Pro instead.

The machine is awesome and I haven't regretted the decision to buy it... until this last week. That's when I shot my newest video for DPR Friday. I shoot the video segments using my Canon HD video recorder and then import the HD video into my Mac. The video files are then sent to DPR Headquarters in Chicago for final editing.

I shot the video, featuring Midwest's Stylus ATC handpiece, and then got ready to import the video file when I realized the new MacBook Pro has different digital video ports from the old machine. Ack! The Canon camera has one cable & it works great with the OLD machine but cannot connect with the new one.

A trip to the Apple store gave me no solutions and I *had*to get the video on its way. So... rather than spend a bunch of time trying to solve the cable problem, I decided to solve the monitor problem instead.

It seems that most digital TV's now have as one of their inputs, computer VGA. So I connected my old MacBook Pro to one of the flat screen TV's in my house and suddenly I had a computer screen that showed the desktop of my old Mac. I was then able to connect the video camera, create the video file, and then transfer the file over my network to DPR.

It was quick, easy, and could be done with any laptop, not just a Mac. Sometimes it pays to think outside the box. Matter of fact, this works so well, I may not bother looking for a new cable at all... even though I probably should!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

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