My First DVD Story...

Mr_Christopher wrote on 12/27/2004, 2:33 PM
We have a new daughter (our first) so we got a sony camera so we coudl make home movies and such...what a nice idea, huh?

I finally finished the DVD of my daughter's first year on this planet for my parents. it only cost me about $1,500 :-)

Get a nice, modern computer they said, so I did...about $500 (P4, 2.5Gz, 528MB RAM) ....Use the free MS Movie Maker,they said, but you'll need XP....so I did...$198....Get a fancy schmancy video card and more RAM, so I did...$250....Then Service pack 2 blew up my computer...I think the error message was something like "Go directly to jail and lose a turn..."

After rebuilding my computer...."get a bigger additional drive to work with your movies", so I did...$180....After weeks of absolute misery using the free MS Movie Maker..."Don't use Microsoft Movie Maker, get Roxio", so I did...$100....(Well THAT was dumb but it beat the Microslop product)), after weeks of misery working with Roxio I heard, "get Sony Movie Studio" they said, so I did...$100 (best $100 I ever spent)...

So I worked for months on 6 videos that will be burned to two DVDs...After I had rendered them all (last wednesday evening) my computer started blowing up, literally...I am about to freakin' lose 6 months worth of blood sweat and tears so I quickly went out and bought a new external drive and started backing up my data...$200....(the pc literally blew up an hour after I backed up all the files).

take the computer to the computer shop...actually i took two computers for repair...$168....and the movie computer is still wanked...Don't panic...I can burn the video to DVD from another computer in the house...no big deal, except I install DVD Architect on that computer, create the DAR file/project go to burn the DVD and the only pc with a DVD burner does not realize it has a DVD burner! that's my wife's work computer and i am not going to start wanking with her means of income for these movies...

so on christmas eve I go out and buy an external DVD recorder (in case it doesn't work with one pc, it should work with another and I don't have to keep ripping pcs apart), so I can have this done by christmas ...$198 (the cheaper external DVD recorders were all gone by then)....

the first burned DVD was unbearably wanked...The audio, the video...and it took 6 hours to complete...panic was setting in.. was it movie studio? the external dvd recorder? the external drive? the usb hub? or the under powered pc that was doing all the processing? I had about 12 hours to figure that out...

i changed a setting or two and tried again...well the final DVD was finished 30 minutes before we left to go to my parents on christmas :-) they were thrilled! I was tired...

I had no idea making home video/DVDs was so expensive :-)

Oh, and you can tell by the amount of questions that I asked here today that I have much more to learn...

Chris

Comments

BigEgg wrote on 12/28/2004, 5:32 AM
... and you can tank your God that you didn't use Pinnacle Studio to edit your movies...
Mr_Christopher wrote on 12/28/2004, 9:20 AM
Oh no....A good friend just got Pinnacle...I'll encourage him to back up often!

Chris
Steve Grisetti wrote on 12/28/2004, 12:56 PM
Sorry yours has been such a bumpy road, Chris. I know it's no consolation to hear that I bought a computer on Thursday, installed my software that night, worked on a video over the weekend and output it Monday -- and installed SP2 without so much as a hiccup.

So maybe you used up all your bad luck at once and you'll have nothing but great luck from here on out!

Meantime, use AdAware and Spybot to keep the spyware at bay and keep a copy of Norton Systemworks (or another quality system doctor) on hand for weekly clean-up. Those little bugs add up after a while.
JamesMessick wrote on 1/2/2005, 1:34 PM
Congratulations. Shooting, capturing, and editing the video only seems to be half the battle. Burning a DVD is the other half. I have a burner that 'should' burn +R discs at 8x, but it doesn't seem to like +R at all. I can burn -R discs, but only at 2x. +RW? Forget it.

I'm not sure whey "they" told you to get a new video card, but you can alwas use it to play games. Personally I think 512 Mb is enough RAM. The extra hard drive to back up is a great idea though.

James
PhilBiker wrote on 1/7/2005, 11:00 AM
".. and you can tank your God that you didn't use Pinnacle Studio to edit your movies..."

And how!

Hey the good thing is now each video will get easier to make and cheaper too because you've already made the investment!
tceaves wrote on 1/7/2005, 11:29 AM
I always burn at 1x using -R disks.

I have been using -R disks for 2 years now. I have found that burning faster than 1x sometimes produces disks that can't be watch by my in-laws. I have read on this forum and other places that +R disks are not supported by many DVD players.

I like you am into the "movie making business" to document my first child... # 2 on the way so it looks like I will have a full life of making home movies.
ducnbyu wrote on 1/7/2005, 12:26 PM
Sorry to hear about your rotten luck. I share your pain with regards to Movie Maker. After 1.5 years of trying to work around the glitches in MM I installed MS and DVDA which seem to be having an easy time hardware wise. The installation was fast and it works with my configuration. Haven't looked into 4.0a yet. My feeling now is "if it ain't broke..." I seem to be able to get through MS without a lot of reading in the help files. And I enjoy reading the techniques here because I can easily envision how they are accomplished.

But DVDA is another story. I'm not finding it all that intuitive and reading the manual doesn't help much because in the areas where I struggle the most, that's where it doesn't have pictures... Hey I'm a visual kind of guy. I'm hoping the help files are more detailed. Problem is I have very little time to work on this stuff as it is.

For instance I did all the steps in the manual for adding a movie to a menu and creating chapter points. But I only got the original chapter 1 on the menu that was there before I started adding my markers. Didn't see how the other chapters were supposed to get to the menu. I was also in a hurry to find out if DVDA worked with my burner so I'm sure it's a matter of slowing down and figuring it out. Is it because I didn't save the markers that they didn't show up? The manual makes it sound like that would have modified the media file which I did not want to do.

Another thing I find confusing about the DVDA manual. It has a whole chapter 6 titled "Creating a Single Movie DVD or Object" and talks about chapter markers for viewer navigation. It refers you to Chapter 2 "Getting Started" where it states that Single Movies contain no menus. So how does a viewer navigate by chapter if there are no menus? And Chapter 2 refers you back to Chapter 6 where it only has 1 sentence about creating a single movie and mostly talks about adding a movie object to a Menu project.

Can anyone offer clarity on what chapters 2 and 6 are trying to say regarding whether or not Single Movies and chapter markers are mutually exclusive?

I hope I'm not straying the thread too far it seemed to be about difficulties.

Update: put more time into DVDAS found out what I was doing wrong with the chapters: I was creating the scene selection menu before setting the chapter points. Also figured out how to had a chapter point to an existing scene selection menu.

Thanks,
Rye