DVD Blues

After some friends came to visit St. Louis in the first part of June, I decided to construct a DVD of photos and videos taken from their trip. This isn't something unusual for me to do, only they stayed for long enough I got a lot of photos and a lot of video, much of which was worth including. I made an hour long DVD in iMovie, spliced together appropriate music bits from iTunes and presto — almost.

It seems that somewhere in the soundtrack there is something that is corrupted. Not to the extend that keeps me from previewing the movie, but bad enough that it causes iDVD to freeze when it tries to encode the audio to the MPEG-2 for the DVD. Worse, at three or four hours a shot to try encoding before it freezes at the very end, this isn't something I can easily locate. I thought perhaps it was my PowerMac, so I burnt a CD with the 4 GB of movie data and put it in my PowerBook and set that system to work. After rendering for five or so hours, it too failed.

Presently I'm trying a last ditch effort: iMovie creates a “reference” QuickTime file, as I understand it, a patchwork of links to the bits included in the iMovie Project playable in QuickTime. This is the file that iDVD receives to encode. This file, for my project, happens to be in MPEG-4 format (H.264). I fed this file into MPEG Streamclip, a program for converting and exporting MPEG files and set it to work at 1:45 p.m. yesterday to the task of creating a real MPEG-4 file out of the reference file. As of 12:22 a.m. today, I am now at 94%. I just hope it works.

I am obsessed — I've essentially given up most access to my computers for the last two days to let them render and encode, despite needing them for other things, because I've come too far not to see this movie burn. It just has to! So, here I sit, waiting.

I hope it works.