I recently went up to Logan, UT to shoot a wedding video for some friends of Jeremy Lindstrom. Rob and Lisa were just awesome and though it was windy the day turned out beautiful (though none of the audio was usable) which was ok because the plan was to overlay music anyway.
The original plan was to also have the video done and ready--same day-- for the reception that night. But things ended up taking too long outside the Temple and I wanted to drive up on the hills in Logan and get some awesome shots of the Temple.
Well, when I got home, my computer wouldn't turn on...
We took it into the Apple Store and they told me it was the button on the back of the computer. They also said it was in no way possible that it was a manufacturer error, i.e. "I had been hitting the button with a hammer or something"is kind of what the guy was getting at; which is ridiculous. The iMac actually did this to me right out of the box, but I was able to get it working after fiddling with the button, but that only lasted so long. So, after yelling at the guy and whining a little bit they agreed to not charge me for the repair.
So I left my big expensive 27" iMac there knowing that I had a good amount of time before Rob and Lisa's 2nd reception where they planned to show the video. Few days went by, we picked up the computer (which also had all of the video files from the wedding stuck on it) and I was eager to get it home and get working on it. Monday evening I was up late cutting it together. I got it to almost perfection but I still needed to finalize volume levels and do the title shot.
Next morning. The computer would only come back on for 30 seconds before shutting itself off; a tale-tell sign of a bad harddrive. I spent the day at work just worried about it, because I still hadn't time to back up the footage. We ran to Best Buy that night and got a harddrive and I tried a trick Charles taught me, which is that you can turn a Mac off, hook it up to firewire, and hold down the T key, to access the Mac's HDD without it having to boot. And while this was cool and reassured me that the HDD still had all the information on it. The machine would still shut down after 30 seconds and not allow me to transfer any files.
So we took it back to Apple. They looked at it, said the found a lose connection, repaired it and next day we took it back. We got it home and it was doing the same thing... This is less than 2 days before the reception.
So, yesterday (Friday), Shellena runs the machine to the Mac store, while I had to be on a shoot yesterday. They determine that they can't determine what's wrong with my machine, so they decided to just replace it--THANK YOU APPLE CARE! But they had to transfer all the 800GB of storage onto my new iMac.
The shoot ended at 8:30pm last night. I called the store and they said it was done doing the data transfer. We were 30 minutes away and Apple Genius Bar closes at 9pm. So we raced down the highway. Chris's speedometer doesn't work which turns out to be a good thing when speeding to get to the mall before they close.
I ran in the door at 8:55pm.... and needless to say, came home with a brand new iMac. Stayed up until 2:00AM finishing the video and there you have. The most difficult process of getting a DVD ready for a wedding reception.
