Part 1: The Night Before

The night before was a day of spending time with our parents and finalizing last minute details, including our wedding video collage. I had made our wedding video at least 15 separate times. I made one about a year ago, when I was sick and was messing around on my computer. Only problem was when I got my new laptop and new movie maker program. Microsoft didn't make the new version compatible with the old version. STUPID. So I made different versions with different programs.  None compared to the first one I made, so I continued throughout the months to make different ones. I finally made one on Jeff's lap top that I loved. Sadly shortly after his laptop got a virus and crashed and burned. No more video.  So the week before the wedding I had made the video AGAIN and was just waiting for our groomal pictures so I could add them at the end. I thought simple addition and then I'm done, right?  Try again! I saved it to a flash drive so I could burn it to a DVD on Jeff's parents computer. I thought again simple enough task and I'll have no problems. Boy was I wrong.

When I moved the video and the pictures simply enough. When I went to play the video, it played but didn't show any of the pictures. WTF? Apparently, the video had lost the picture locations and just showed a big red X. So the night before the wedding at like 8:00pm I had to start ALL OVER!!!!  {I promise, I am not computer illiterate. I have made tons of videos the same way and never had problems.} At this point in time I thought all the computers in the world were out to get me and ruin my reception. Dramatic moment, I think yes. All brides have them.  Throughout this whole aggravating process Jeff, my husband-to-be, was by my side and trying to keep me calm. He sat by the computer and eventually fell asleep in the most awkward position. Bless his heart.  Fortunately, I got the video made in about an hour and a half. Saved the video as a video file played it back pictures and everything ran perfectly.  Tried it on 3 separate computers, for good measure. Everything worked... Hallelujah!

Yet, my troubles weren't over yet. I had Jeff save it for me to a DVD disk because the reception center only had DVD players connected to the TVs. No big deal. Wrong again.We must have ruined at 15 DVD and a handful of CDs trying to get it to play. No such luck.  I remembered in my sleepy state of mind that DVD players only play certain types of files. So I started trying to find a program to convert the file to DVD compatible files. The first program I tried put a big hug watermark across every image on the video. Not what you want. So I tried another, that one only would give you 5 minutes of video and mine was 12. Another epic failure. I found programs that would do what I needed, but cost upwards of $70!!!  I still believed that somewhere in the worldwide web I could find a free trial source. After all I only had ONE STINKING VIDEO!!! I just couldn't justify spending that much money and was determined to do it do it for free.Well I couldn't find a single program on the web, so my hopes were pretty low at this point in time. I was just about to fork out the ridiculous cost, when Jeff stepped in.

It was getting later and later and he knew we needed sleep. He reached out to his cousin Bobby, aka computer genius, for help.  Unfortunately, Bobby said he didn't really deal with videos or converting files and told us to reach out to Jason. (Jason is Jeff's cousin Lizzy's husband and also a groomsman) We called him and asked if he knew what we could do and he told us to come over. We drove over to their apartment a little after 11 at night.  Jason agreed to work on it and see what he could do to convert it the video for us. OUR HERO!!! We left our faith in Jason and home we went.  Now for sleep. Guess again! {P.S. I had been up since 3:30am that morning so we are approaching a full 24 hours with no sleep. Insane, yes!}

Moments before the ceremony was to begin, Jason was still working on the video. Thank you!

The first thing you need to understand is that Jeff and I are horrible procrastinators at everything, which included writing what we were going to say during our ring ceremony. So a little after midnight and the wedding ceremony in less than 10 hours.  I sat on my bedroom floor with my mom and started to write and rewrite what I was going to say.{ All the while crying in between sentences.} It was all becaming too real at this point. I was emotional, tired, stressed, anxious, and overwhelmed. But I managed to get it perfect and printed. I finally managed to fall asleep at about 2:30am for the last time as Katie Moosman.

TO BE CONTINUED... 

P.S. I just want to thank Jason for spending the night before the wedding working on getting our video to work. We don't know what we would have done without you. One thing is for sure we wouldn't have had a video at all at the reception. Thank you again! You are the greatest!!!

Jeff couldn't have picked better groomsman.
They helped so much throughout the day we owe them big time!!

Love Always,