LO4: Preparation Role

Festival- Preparation Role

Another role I had to fulfil in Festival was to collect all the group’s documentaries together and set them up on separate computers dotted around the library. As I had recently bought two 8GB pendrives, it seemed the obvious choice to use them to transport the documentaries from the computers in the diploma rooms to the ones in the library.

The first thing I did was to see Mr Bennett, one of Turton’s media technicians who already had about four of the existing documentaries. Together with the addition of Ben Sofield, we went down to L12, one of the Diploma rooms, where Mr Bennett logged in to the computers, as an Administrator. This meant that he could access any work which had been saved onto these computers by any user.

As I knew quite a bit about how to use iMovie and iMovie HD6, I set to work converting the files from their existing format to Quicktime, which meant that they could be played using media players on the library computers. To do this I clicked “Share” on the bar at the top of the screen, and clicked “Export Using Quicktime”, then “Full quality”. I did this for all the computers Mr Bennett had logged onto in the room. Once they had finished converting to Quicktime, all the documentaries needed to be put on my pendrives and then either given to Mr Bennett or taken up to the library.

A problem then surfaced- I had only brought one pendrive to school, which meant that we could only transfer one film at a time. However, as we could still carry on doing it for a few hours at least, and as it did not slow down the time taken to convert each documentary into Quicktime format, it didn’t prove too serious. Once one of the documentaries had finished converting, I put my pendrive into the computer and started copying the file.

Each of the documentaries took between ten to fifteen minutes to convert into quicktime, and about six to twelve minutes to copy onto my pendrive. As I was just waiting and doing nothing else whilst I was waiting for each film to copy to my pendrive individually, I decided to go with Ben to help out with any other jobs which needed doing. As Ben had offered to help me in my role, I helped him in his, which was transporting props from the Record Unit up to the Library, each time going back every ten minutes or so to set the next documentary up on my pendrive and so on. I also helped transport other things such as large cardboard boards which needed two people to carry each up to the library.

After a while, I found that another problem had arisen. Each film took up between the space of 1 and 2 GB on my pendrive, and after five films the space ran out. However, I went over to Mr Bennett’s office where he removed the documentaries from my pendrive and stored them on his computer, ready for me to get going with another five or so more.

After I had got all the documentaries off the computers in L12, I moved over to L10, where there were four or five more for me to copy. However, by this time I was running out of time, as three and a half hours had already passed and I wanted to get everything finished in the day. Furthermore Mrs Kearns set us a challenge of having everything completely ready by half past seven, which gave me an hour to complete my task.

However, when I had completed my second to last lot of documentaries, I went to find Mr Bennett to create more free space on my pendrives and discovered that he was nowhere to be found.

Of course, I didn’t know if he was coming back to school or not, so I prepared for the worst, and remembered that he still had at least five documentaries on the computer in his office which was still locked. It was then that I had the notion of copying the original five films I had done in L10 to a second pendrive while I took the other pendrive up to the library to get them deposited there instead.

First, I needed to free up my existing pendrive, so went up to the library where Mr Bigland transferred all the documentaries off there onto the reference drive, which meant they could be accessed on any computer.

Secondly, I needed another pendrive, so I dashed home to get one, and back to school again. However, the moment I got back, to my relief, I passed Mr Bennett in the corridor, so I didn’t need to copy those films again after all. I then went back to L10 and, using the other pendrive, copied the remainder of the films.

Once all the remaining documentaries had been copied onto the reference drive, myself, with the help of Mr Bigland and Shaun logged in to the computers in the library, and set up the documentaries on each one using VLC, as Windows Media Player and Quicketime Player proved rather jumpy when playing.

I fully completed my role just five minutes before half seven.

Patrick Johnson 11S1