A couple years later I opened my eyes to the concept of FireWire and digital video. I had actually forgotten that I had purchsed the DV version. When I realized that my computer had been FireWire capable all that time, I ran out and bought myself a digital camcorder, and familiarized myself with iMovie. It was a pretty small learning curve. And it revolutionized my ability to produce video. I was surprised at how much could actually be done with the basic iMovie software. The computer had a 10G hard drive. When I first started using it, this seemed like an unfathomable amount of space I would never come close to even making a dent in. But when I started working in digital video, the space went quick. In fact it turned out that I could only have works-in-progress on disk. When I finished a project I would upload it back to video tape and delete it from the disk to make space. This was a point of no return. The finished project would be perfectly well preserved on digital tape, but all the edit points, sound mixing, and other iMovie features would be oblitereated. It would then become just one contiguous clip. Alas, after a couple more years I heard the hard drive making a very disturbing "clunk" noise all the time. I knew I had to upgrade before I lost all my files and digital video.
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