±«Óãtv

Brave new world

• Chris Long
• 9 Jan 07, 02:49 AM

Here in technology world life is different to other places, where as other worlds have old wooden, dusty ways of doing things - most of them in black and white - all our stuff is shiny and new, and in millions upon millions of colour.

Thus it will come as no surprise to you that we are not using ordinary ways of sending our pictures back to the UK (or the Old World as we now call it). No longer are we strapping rolls of film to transatlantic carrier pigeons. We are using the internet.

Now when we did a programme from Japan back in late 2005 we tried this out for the first time - and it worked (no one was more surprised than us). We would shoot video, then transfer it to our laptop and then put it on the web via X-Drive.

Now this is a nightmare way of doing it - we had lots of trouble then with X-Drive's systems (availability was rubbish) but the biggest problem is ADSL upload speeds

You may get multi megabits down to your computer but its only kilobits up to the internet - thus sending a one gigabyte video file can take some time. But it worked, and our CEATEC show was a marvel of hope over reality.

Here in technology world we have a truck, a T1 line (which is about 1.4meg either way) and some super scrunching software. The scrunching software scrunches up our video files so they take even less time to send to the UK.

When they get to the UK some ±«Óãtv technical whiz kids unscrunch them and send them to the guys manning the Click bunker.

Are we cool or what?

Having finished the first of our video blogs we sent it back to the UK and patted ourselves on the back for being so smart.

After downing some ice cold beers to celebrate I went to bed - "job done".

So when I got the call at 00:45 that there was a problem with the file I started to reassess precisely just how well done this job was. Apparently the scrunching software had, and I have the technical definition written down here - "thrown a wobbly" and lost the last minute and 19 seconds of the video blog.

So there I was at 01:15 back on the laptop fiddling with Premiere to recreate the end of the video blog - and then, having succeeded, discovered that the hotel's wireless network was down. Pathetically I simply kept on trying the network - it was late and I was stressed, but I really can't recall what it was that just kept me pressing enter to retry the network.

The network came on briefly at 01:30 and I sent the re-scrunched file back - and joy it was a success.

With a little surgery the video blog was fixed and it is there for you to throw stones at on our site.

But I'm looking forwards to coming home. Our wireless network is down again and when it comes back I'm going to book tickets to the old world as soon as I can.