The instant era

It’s one thing to watch and record your kids performance on stage and another to share the same with friends and family. 

Yesterday was the event of Rajyothsava and Deepawali organized by our very own Austin Kannada Sangha (AKS). Our kids practiced a lot, parents (read moms) worked hard behind the scenes and made the entire performance a grand success. 

Now, the dads on duty were given the task of recording the onstage performance and thanks to our high end smart phones it was not a tough job to accomplish. All that mattered was to find the right location nearest to the stage to sit and hold the phone still to record a good video. It was an easy task, the tough task that none of us (primarily Windows user) didn’t foresee was the problem of sharing the video with our friends and family. 

Considering the act was exactly 12 min long, recorded at the rate of 40-60 FPS with 18 megapixel cameras the file sizes were larger than we had ever imagined. Considering the high speed internet that we all are so used to, we rarely pay attention to file sizes and come to think of it  it’s the fault of the phones too which doesn’t let us know the file sizes. 

So, the traditional method of sharing on WhatsApp petered out for the file size was too big for their network. Then it was decided to go home and upload to Google Drive. That’s where the challenge started which none of us really foresaw. Apple’s iOS was working seamlessly to backup the phone to the Windows PC but try downloading a file either through the traditional windows explorer route or through windows photo app or even through Picasa it would throw an error saying device is unresponsive and hence can’t copy the file. 

So, windows was a no go, next step direct upload to Google Drive from the phone but that was taking so long to even process; It was not worth the wait. After almost an hour of fighting with the iOS ecosystem I had reached a point of giving up. At this point by sheer luck I decided to upload the video to iCloud Drive and that worked like a charm and few moments later when I logged into my iCloud Drive, I could see the file there. Surprisingly it allowed me to download the same. That’s how the file was transferred to PC and finally put up to Google Drive/YouTube and shared.

Moral of the story, If the video you are trying to share is more than 5-7 minutes long and WhatsApp has petered out and your options are windows PC or laptop then the best way and possibly the only way would be to upload video to iCloud and then download from there .