Thursday update

Well, I didn't update for two days - got a little behind but here it is, for anybody who wants to know!
Thursday was one of our lower days. The morning class the students all got the machines together (got all of the peripherals unboxed and plugged in - including monitor, speakers, keyboard, mouse, network into the switch etc) and we installed the operating systems (we are using Microsoft Vista). But, we were unable to get them on the Internet. After about 20 minutes are playing around with settings and buttons, we had to move on. After class was over we were able to get back to the machines and get them online, but it was one of those I don't know why it works now and didn't work then? The best we could decide it was a cable issue, perhaps a loose wire or connector that wasn't pushed in all the way... The machines are new and pretty high end and the OS only took about 30 minutes to install. Pretty quick and really not to user involved. Once you begin the process, you don't need to be back again untill it is done (no stopping half way through to ask about a keyboard or time like XP).
The afternoon class continued to give me issues. While the students were understanding and really not too upset about the problems, the .mod files were still a pain. We were able to convert them over to the .mpg just by changing the extension and they worked but they were clunky. It is difficult to try and edit a movie when it is jumping a few seconds every time you are watching through it. So, to try and fix this, we had the students put the .mpg files in the timeline in the order that they wanted and then after class was over I went ahead and exported the movie as a .avi file. Then, I took that .avi file and was able to import that back into Premiere with no problem. The choppy was gone and it worked pretty well. The students will be able to edit and cut up this file the same way they would the other files and it worked better. Of course, as of Thursday evening, I didn't know if it was going to work. To make a movie with the .mpg files took a long time (over an hour to make a 3 minute movie). In comparision, the .avi files that we used the next day took about 4 minutes to export!!