Another answer to prayer

Yesterday afternoon I had an amazing answer to prayer...

(To understand this story, you have to understand what a project file is. In Adobe Premiere Pro, you can put together video sequences. It saves various pieces of information about the clips [in and out points, volume changes, where they belong in the sequence, how much of them you used, which track they are on, what effects you applied] in a .prproj file. Then when you open the project, it loads all that information, applies it to the clips in real time, and eventually exports the data to Media Encoder or Encore, which can make finished video files and DVDs respectively. That way you don’t modify the original clips whenever you make changes. However, if you lose the project, you lose all your work, although you still have the video files that you had in the sequence. Also, the advantage of a project file is that if you need to move the project file, it’s very small, like only a few MB, so it doesn’t take up as much space as storing separate copies of all the clips.)

At around 11:40 I was finishing up my video work for the morning, and I saved my project and closed the programs at 11:51. In the middle of saving the project, the computer crashed. Now ordinarily, it would just be annoying to have my computer crash like that, but this was in the middle of saving my project, so I was kind of worried about it. However, I was pretty sure it had finished saving before it crashed, so I thought it should be fine. So, I left my computer off and went to give a piano lesson to Matthew, and then we went outside for a while, and then we came back in and did something else… When I went back to open that project, I opened Premiere, and the list of recent projects was blank. Well, that’s interesting, I thought, so I clicked on “Open project” and selected the right one. The little window, “Loading project” came up, and the progress bar started going across as usual. Then it got stuck halfway across, and it wouldn't go any further. Oh no! I had put over 40 hours of work into this project, and I couldn’t afford to lose it now. Maybe Premiere was messed up because my computer had crashed… I tried opening another project, and it worked just fine. So it must not be Premiere. It was that corrupted project… I opened it again, and let it sit for an hour while I ate lunch, hoping that if I gave it enough time, it would figure it out and open the project. I came back upstairs after lunch, and it was still stuck at that halfway point! Would my trouble ever end? I was quite upset, although I chose not to give in to despair. We had to leave the house a few minutes later to go for guitar lessons and errands, and the whole time we were gone I thought over my trouble. Actually not the whole time. I had a glimmer of hope. Two things: first, I prayed, and committed the whole situation into God’s hands – after all, He could fix a corrupted file if He chose to… and secondly, I realized that Premiere Pro will autosave every 5 minutes to a predetermined folder. If I could find that folder, then there was a chance that my project could be in there – but only if I had saved it at the right time so as not to override the autosaving. When I got back home, 4 hours later, the first thing I did after all the groceries were brought in and my evening chores completed was to go to my computer and find the autosave folder. I found the folder, and it had the 5 versions of my project in there (I have Premiere set to keep the 5 latest versions). My regular project was saved at 11:51. The last autosave project was saved at 11:50. I could hardly believe it. One minute was the difference between losing that morning's work and possibly the whole project vs. the opposite... Now of course there were 4 other versions, but they were considerably older, because I usually save my project very often in case my computer crashes, and that overrides the autosave, I think. So I would have had to spend quite a bit more time redoing the videos. I backed up the autosave project, and saved it as a “recovered” version of my project. I am now almost finished with it. Isn’t it amazing the mercy and compassion that God has on us? I am not worthy of such great love. But yet He arranged for my project to have an autosaved version that contained every single one of the changes that I had made that morning in my 3 hours of work.

Our God is amazing!