When I have a few minutes to kill during the day and start randomly dropping by some of my friend’s websites or blogs, it’s always pleasant to find one or two that have actually been updated. (And even more pleasant when they’re updated with content that I actually enjoy perusing.)

So why have I been depriving my own readers of this pleasure for the last few weeks?

Good question, really. After we got back from Hawaii, I felt like I’d over-blogged, and wanted to give folks a few days to catch up before marching ahead with new entries.

Then I headed out of town again, this time solely for work. However, I still had evenings mostly free, and plenty to blog about (though it might be safer for my job if I opted not to describe in too much detail what happens to astronomers when they go out drinking). So why not then? And why not when I got back from said business trip (which was quite a lot of fun), and spent a week at home while Jeff was out of town. I had lots of free time then.

Except, I kind of didn’t. See, while I was in Minneapolis for work, I started to work on editing the video that I took in Hawaii. (In the evenings; not while at the conference.) And the damn thing has taken over my life. I haven’t really had that much downtime in the first place; this month at work has been Hectic, capital letter intended. But every spare moment, I’ve done nothing but fiddle with this video. First, there was importing the video off DV tapes. Then, actually editing it into something watchable. After that, there was music to deal with, and re-edits and audio levels to worry about.

And then: it was time to try to create a DVD.

I started with the fun parts: learning DVD Studio Pro, and photoshopping up some moderately-attractive menus. But DVD Studio Pro is extremely slow and finicky, so attempting what seems simple can wind up costing hours of waiting for the little spinny icon to go away, or of going back to the Photoshop files to get them into EXACTLY THE RIGHT LAYER CONFIGURATION that DVD Studio Pro will deal with.

But finally, I had a menu I could live with, and I was ready to burn a DVD. My freeware editing software only outputs Quicktime; I then feed the Quicktime file to DVD Studio Pro to convert to MPEG (or run it through a compressor program first, if I want to do more advanced settings). Outputting a 24-minute quicktime file takes several hours on my laptop. Compressing it into MPEG on Jeff’s Mac takes several more hours. (Transferring in between takes 0 hours, thanks to my lovely new firewire external drive.)

If I only had to do it once, it would be no big deal. But the result of my first attempt was nearly un-watchable; whenever there was motion on screen, it got this weird jaggedy look – AND, there were horrible compression artifacts, even though I’d chosen to go with high quality.

(WARNING – boring technical details to follow. You may want to stop reading this now.)

Over the next few days, I went back and forth and back and forth. The compression artifacts were because I hadn’t REALLY been at the highest possible quality; that was easily fixed. The blasted jaggedy things are most likely due to a screwed up field order (film is in frames, each of which takes up the whole screen; video actually displays two fields one after the other, in an interlaced pattern, to make up a frame). You’d think this would be easy to fix, but it’s not. I’ve spent the last two days trying various different ways of going from Point A (Avid) to Point B (DVD), and so far, no luck.

Jeff’s friend Mark, who has way more experience outputting video than either of us, finally gave me the info I need: don’t use Avid to export to Quicktime, he said. No matter what he’s ever tried, Avid + DV + exporting winds up with freaky field issues. Instead, I should play the movie on my computer back out onto another DV tape – and then import that directly into iMovie on the Mac.

Right – because there weren’t already enough steps involved.

To make things worse, my laptop with it’s little firewire adapter card did not want to admit to the existence of an attached camcorder, so I couldn’t output to DV. So I made poor Jeff install Avid Free DV on his Mac, and then figured out how to hack into the file locations to make it open my project up from off my firewire drive. (This only took about 45 minutes.)

And sure enough, it works like a charm. For video. For audio, Avid’s DV output tool complains that the music tracks are in a different sample rate than the rest of the audio. If you convert the clips, it just creates new raw clips from the original – you’d then have to re-edit the new ones into place (this is just Avid Free, after all, without all the auto-assembly tools of the full version).

AAAAAAAGH.

So, for those of you who haven’t already given up in boredom, here’s the final workflow for anyone else interested in going from DV (for recording) to Avid (for editing) to DVD Studio Pro (for output):

1. Export the audio tracks as their own Quicktime file
2. Hook up your camcorder and play the video tracks of the movie back into it (using Avid’s Digital Cut tool)
3. Use iMovie to read the movie back into the computer and save it as a Quicktime file
4. Reunite the video and audio quicktime files in DVD Studio Pro

And that only took a week and many sleepless nights to figure out. Whoof.