Ugh. I’d forgot how much work digital video editing is, especially on my computer. I wouldn’t think a 2.4 Ghz machine with a gig of ram would be considered slow for anything, but I’ve been rendering a DVD for two hours now, and DVD Architect claims that it has another ten minutes to go — although it originally predicted the entire thing would take 49 minutes to complete. so that must be 49 minutes of “Microsoft time.” I have four different DVD’s I need to do for four different people.
Friday I videotaped my son’s Christmas program, and his daycare is going to be selling copies for a fundraiser. I’m charging the daycare my cost of materials, and they’re keeping all profits. I put about five hours worth of work into the project (not including the actual recording time, since I would have been at the show either way). To make a DVD, first you have to copy the video over from the camcorder to the computer. That’s done at real time, so however long the video is, that’s how long it’ll take. Once that’s done the video has to be edited. For the Christmas program, all the gaps in between the performances were eliminated, fade ins/outs were added, and so on. Once you get the video how you want it, it all has to be rendered. The Christmas program has 4 videos, and each one took about 15 minutes to render. It doesn’t take much work (you just click “render”), but while it’s working you can’t do anything else on your computer. So while that was going I went upstairs to my other computer and began working on the graphics and layout for the DVD cover — that was all done in Photoshop. At the same time I laid out the graphics for the top of the disc, which we are having custom printed. Once the videos are done rendering, you can begin laying out your DVD. For this one, I did a custom background graphic with the daycare’s logo with some added snowflakes. I laid out the DVD’s menu with Sonic Foundry’s DVD Architect. Somewhere around this point I realized that I had managed to cut off the end of the toddlers singing “Jingle Bells”, so I had to recapture the entire video again from the camcorder, re-render it, and then re-import it into DVD Architect. Once you get everything exactly how you want it, you can finally click “Make DVD”, which then re-encodes the entire project one last time into a DVD-compatible format (VOB files). Once that was completed I was finally able to burn a copy, which I’m taking to the daycare tomorrow for final approval. There’s not much talent needed to do these things, but they sure take up a lot of time!
Right now I’m working on DVD #2, a friend’s cousin’s wedding video. This DVD had three different source materials: camcorder video (shot on digital), a bunch of still pictures (to be converted into a slideshow), and a bunch of short clips shot on (I believe) someone’s cell phone. The camcorder video was a cinch to copy over — all digital means slapping the tape into my camcorder and copying the footage over (again at 1x, or real time speed). The slideshow was easier to accomplish than I thought. DVD Architect has a “make slideshow” feature — cool! I imported the pictures, and the program did the rest. I added an MP3 as background music for good measure. The camera phone clips turned out to be the most difficult part of the project. There were 43 of them, all in AVI format. Each of them had to be converted into MPEG files. Once that was complete, each had to be imported into DVD Architect and have their scale adjusted. Of course none of them were DVD compliant quality, so DVD Architect then had to re-render them all when creating the DVD. That’s what’s running right now — I’m at 2 hours and counting. Assuming all goes well with that process, I’ll just have to burn it and then I’ll be done with that one as well.
Project three is my sister’s wedding video and number four is some television programs. I had hoped to get to these today/tonight as well, but I figured doing these would take a couple of hours each, not four or five. The other problem I’m running into is drive space. Each of these DVD’s requires several copies of everything. You’ve got all the original source material (which might take up a gig or more), plus if you’ve edited the originals and saved copies, those take up space as well. Plus, when done rendering, you get another 4 or so gig of files taking up hard drive space. I want to keep copies on the hard drive until I’m sure everyone’s pleased with how stuff turned out, so I’m going to need to make some space on the network to store this stuff for a few days. Once the wedding video is done I’ll copy that and the daycare video over to another computer, freeing up space to start on the other video projects tomorrow.