4 Minutes

"We only got four minutes to save the world." I like this song by Madonna and Justin. I got it as a free download the other day, from a sticker on a CD I bought.

I hear it on the radio once in a while and think how great it sounds. So now I can listen to it any old time. Ya-ha!

Four minutes is the amount of time we used to get on a Super 8 movie cartridge. I used to think how cool it'd be to have more time, so you weren't rushing through taking a movie. Little did I know four minutes was about right. Anything more than that you've got long, extended boring movies instead of the quick cuts and rushing from one subject to another.

I've had video cameras over the years, including a black and white one in 1979. It needed to be hooked up to a home VCR at the time, so it was impossible (for me) to be dragging it anywhere besides the apartment where we lived. The few videos that still exist are boring, the kids, I don't know what. But at least they have this to their credit, they're short.

My next video camera was a color one, and it seems like we could put a VHS tape in it ... or maybe it too was hooked up to a VCR. Now that I think of it, I don't remember taking videos around outside. The ones I took were inside. Someone broke in and stole it, so it's long gone.

There's the video feature on my Olympus camera, but it barely counts because the videos are just small crap. And the video feature on my phone, worse yet. Those don't count.

Now I have a Flip Ultra, and it takes video for around 55 minutes before it's filled up. I was just videoing the dog and thinking I should keep it around four minutes. I videotaped a thing yesterday that was 50-some minutes. The file is huge, hard to handle. You make a copy of it and it takes forever to process, like trimming it. Although it was a lot faster with the Flip software (still crappy) that came with it than with Windows Movie Maker.