Nevermind, I figured it out. The clip at :30 was just a preview of what was to happen within the video.
After the crash, I went back in and experimented with the conversion to mesh and the crash didn’t happen and it did keep my original and it did create the new mesh, as presented in the lecture.
The below is inaccurate (I guess?) but I’m leaving it here because it might help someone else:
At ~:30 in 47 Converting a Curve To Mesh, he points out that we should notice that “if you were very carefully looking at the outline”…blah blah blah…“you also have a mesh profile.” With tons of other stuff about how neat it is and toggling, etc.
I obviously wasn’t very carefully looking at the outline, so I retraced the video and saw it was indeed there at the beginning of the video for this lecture. It is NOT there in my project. So, I went back to the end of 46 Introduction to Bezier Curves to verify that it had also magically shown up there while I wasn’t carefully looking at the outline. It isn’t there at the end of the video lecture on 46. So, it magically showed up during the quiz, obviously off camera. I doubt that going from one lesson to the next will cause things like that to show up suddenly.
It’s not there on my project? The reasonable thing to do is ignore it and forge ahead. However, when I forge ahead, Blender crashes when converting to mesh. I understand that that has happened to many of the community members and that there is a work-around. I’m just wondering if whatever caused the magic mesh to show up would have kept the Blender crash from happening to so many people.
Seriously curious how the thing important enough to mention for so long got left out of the course and whether having that would have prevented the problem.
Please advise, if you can.