raycevick

Software is Shit

Added 2021-05-28 13:00:05 +0000 UTC

The first video I ever made was on my Mother's 2006 Macbook. The software was iMovie, and the hardware used to record gameplay footage was a Camcorder with RCA jacks, letting me plug it into the TV and use its tapes to capture Halo 2 gameplay.

Yup, somewhere out there are physical tapes with butchered Halo 2 gameplay by a twelve year old.

To be perfectly honest, I don't recall what the editing experience was like, I've forgotten entire years, I'm not going to recall what keyboard shortcuts were used to splice pieces of footage. The only thing that I do remember was seeing the render screen, and being really confused by "Resolution" "Framerate" and "Bitrate" so I just rendered it multiple times until it was small enough to fit onto Youtubes 80mb limit.

Steadily, I worked my way up to editing videos on a Dual Core Intel Rig with Sony Vegas. The machine was pretty impressive if I do say so myself. It could run Crysis at… maybe 40 frame-per-second.

One thing I'm positively certain of however. That thing was easier to edit on than many of my most recent projects.

I want to be fair. I want to empathize with developers. I want to acknowledge that assembling an hour long analysis with 500gbs of 1440p60fps footage over multiple timelines and six tracks, is going to push your machine far more than a shitty four minute review of Counter Strike Condition Zero.

But then I boot up Web Browsers that respond about as efficiently as they did on my Mother's Macbook, and I can't help but feel like the immense power of today's machine is being comprehensively wasted.

Millions of us are carrying Smartphones more powerful than Supercomputers of the 1990s, machine's used by a total of 10 people in the world, not just Microsoft's headquarters.

And you mean to tell me that a computer several times more powerful than that damn phone can't convert a project file without crashing five seconds later? That some games crawl to 40fps the moment rain's on-screen? That jumps out the window every other time you drop a meme in chat?