Okay. I just spent the better part of two hours doing something that should have taken me 15 minutes tops.

I had a problem with Finder and I thought I could whip up a short screen cast and put it online in order to vent. I have a free screen recording program, which was getting 2 frames per second, which wasn’t enough, so I decided to try Jing, the other free program I have.

Jing worked nicely, but outputs a swf flash file, which means, no editing, and no uploading to YouTube.

So I spent a good half hour or more searching for a viable means to convert from swf to a movie file that I could edit in say, iMovie or FCP or even Window Movie Maker if need be. Anything so I can trim down the file and put it online.

I tried several programs for Mac and Windows, none of them did what I wanted and were also free. I wouldn’t mind paying for software that did this and did it well, if I knew I was going to be doing this on a regular basis. But I don’t know this, and for a one time use I don’t want to shell out $20 or $40 or $80 for the type of software I would need. Several of the pieces of software that looked promising, either didn’t perform quite as expected, or were even advertised as a “free download” but the programs themselves were not free.

Anyway, I have finally given up. I am entirely sick of technology tonight and thus I have uploaded the unedited version of my complaint to my website, and post a link here (below) for all to see. (It’s about a 6MB file, for those who are bandwidth conscious.)

If anyone has any suggestions for dealing with these type of issues in the future, drop me a line. (And yes, I know buying a decent screen recording program would solve all my issues, but I can’t justify that type of financial purchase at the moment.)

Here is the link: Finder’s Search is Broken.