I had a lovely birthday weekend at Catalina with my favorite dive buddy. The weather was beautiful, the water was warm (well, it was warm when you stayed above the 30′ thermocline), the vis was not as bad as it often is, and the fish were out in force. What more could I have asked for?

Friday evening, I picked Jeff up from the airport after his week-long business trip in Florida. He somehow managed to get some dives in while he was there (check out pictures), even testing out his new dual-strobe setup. For our Catalina dives, he had an extra gizmo to learn how to use: we bought the port for our macro lens, so we could get some better pics of all the tiny critters out here and abroad.

Although he’d been up since 3am Pacific time, Jeff managed to make it down the 405 in traffic with me, onto the Catalina Express, into a taxi, and up the many stairs to our musty, un-air conditioned room at the Atwater. We grabbed a quick dinner (though I did most of the eating), and conked out as soon as possible.

Saturday morning, we hopped onto the King Neptune, dive boat of Catalina Scuba Luv. We’ve always been big fans, but this time we weren’t as impressed as usual – mainly because they’d crowded about 26 divers onto the boat, and frankly, more than 15 feels packed! It got worse when they arbitrarily assigned everyone into one of three groups, and said that only one group could gear up and get in the water at a time. We were in group 2, and a big class of new divers was in group 1 – meaning they’d take forever to get in the water, stir up lots of sand once down, and make it generally less pleasant for us. (Can you tell we’re get-in-the-water-first people?)

Jeff made his displeasure known, and for the second dive of the day, our group went first. At the last dive site, we were back to the number 2 spot, but Jeff and I sneaked in while group 1 was dawdling around.

The diving wasn’t spectacular, but it definitely didn’t suck; this is a good thing. Temperatures were 60 or a little over, as long as you stayed above 30 feet or so. There was a nice little thermocline at 30 where the temperatures dropped into the upper 50s, and I’m sure if we’d gone deeper we would have found a few more – but since the visibility also became poorer the deeper we went, we were more than happy to cruise the kelp at 25 feet on pretty much all three dives.

Our second dive site was one I’ve enjoyed before: Sea Fan Grotto. There’s a great little “nook” in the rocky slope at about 35 feet, where gorgonians grow on the wall in the shade. It’s about as coral-like as it gets out here. I got directions from the boat captain (“that way, in about 40 feet”) and we headed off.

We swam for a while along the edge of the rocks and kelp. And swam. And swam and swam and swam. After quite a lot of swimming, we were still in the rock-rubble area; I knew we had to pass to the sheer-rock area before we were even close. But we definitely hadn’t passed it, so we kept on swimming.

Finally, our persistence paid off – sea fans!

A little too murky for good photographs, but it was still a lovely sight. We poked around the gorgonians for a while, and I shone my light back into a cave that I briefly considered going into, but opted not to stir up all the silt that would no doubt result.

Our last dive of the day was the murkiest, and the underwater topography was pretty darned dull. However, we lucked out when it came to critters. First, we spotted a big sheep crab hunkered down behind a rock; I think he was eating something, because when he finally started moving he had what looked like a sea cucumber stabbed with his front claw. Here he is menacing the camera:

They’re slow, but strong. Jeff finally let it wander off before it decided to take apart the housing.

Next, I found an octopus poking its head and tentacles in and out of holes under rocks. At first, it was alarmed by us and hid in a hole. We stayed put for a while, and it eventually started to crawl back out again – only to retreat again every time we got too close or made too much noise. Finally, I started waggling my fingers near the exit of its hole like a possible snack, which enticed it to at least come out a bit more. Once or twice it flashed white and poofed up all “big” to try to scare us off, but eventually it stopped paying attention to us and just went on with its hunt.

Back in Avalon, we wrapped up the evening with dinner at our favorite Catalina restaurant: Channel House. And of course, dessert (including the box of Godiva truffles that Jeff is obliged to buy me for every holiday and occasion, which had unfortunately merged into several SuperTruffles while in the trunk of his car in Florida).

Sunday morning, we rolled out of bed a bit before 8 to make the hike over to Casino Point for a couple of dives. As it turned out, we only did one; the tide was low and the entry/exit slightly tricky, the steps in and out were crowded with students, and we had such a nice, long, fun dive the first time out that we didn’t feel the need to give it another go.

This was Jeff’s first outing with the macro lens, and he tried his best to get me a goby.

I also spotted him a few friendly scorpionfish.

The most memorable part of diving this weekend, for me anyway, was all the garibaldi action. Jeff spent quite a bit of time on both days photographing grown and juvenile garibaldi, and got some interesting shots. On Sunday, we encountered a few very territorial males, who would swim at our faces to try to scare us away. For the first time, I actually heard the thump/click sound they make to try to startle their opponents! It startles the heck out of me every time they swim at me, because I’ve heard Jeff’s biting-garibaldi story many, many times. And yet, I’m totally addicted to the comedy of it. They get so upset with you, especially if you start wiggling fingers – and they look so silly trying to be scary! (I will not stress out the wildlife, I will not stress out the wildlife…)

One male actually had a female in his nest at the time, laying eggs. It would have been a great video subject, or even wide angle – sadly, it was not something that Jeff could capture with a macro lens!

We topped off the day with a little shopping trip: some Catalina tile to use in a coffee table we intend to build sometime. They’re too reflective to photograph with a flash, so this is the best I could do on short notice – what do you think?

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.