Give me bonus marks or give me... four hours of my life I'll never get back.

Yesterday, I'm sitting at home, icing my leg, and thinking to myself... "gee, I should probably start piecing together bits and pieces of the movie that we filmed so far." So, I turn on my computer, plug in my USB, and open up Premier, only to find... THAT THE FILES WON'T WORK.

Apparently, Premiere has it out for me. It won't open my .mpeg files from my Sony HandyCam DC-100 Camcorder. Or more specifically, it won't play the sound. Same deal though, right? You can't properly understand a video without sound, so I figured it was kind of important. So, now problem-solving-Declan shows himself. How do I get this sound to work? Codec error? Most likely. But I have a pirated version of Premiere (*sshhhhhh) so I can't get updates for the Codec files. What else could it be? OF COURSE! The file type. Maybe I should convert the file type to an .mp4.

So now it's been about 30 minutes of cursing at the computer for not loading the sound on my videos. But I had to move on. I download and open up a free trial version of AVS-Video Converter software (legally obtained of course) and converted the videos.

There was a watermark on the damn videos.

I can't hand in a project with a watermark, so I had to go download ANOTHER pirated program (again, *ssshhhh) of AVS-Video Converter. Now it's been well over an hour and a half of downloading, re-downloading, and installing programs to my computer. FINALLY, I get the program to work. I convert the videos to .mp4, import it into Premiere, and... they don't work.

If you can't see where this is going, I took the same approach as last time, and re-converted the videos to about 4 or 5 other formats, none of them working of course, since, as hinted at earlier, Premiere is the devil. Finally, I give in. Maybe I can convert it from an original .mpeg, to another type of .mpeg. It sounded stupid, but then again, I'd tried everything else, and I was pushing close to 4 hours at this point of looking up a solution for my problem on google.

I convert it to another .mpeg file. I put it into Premiere. It works.

Give me bonus marks or give me death.