Why is desktop video editing and DVD authoring so damn screwed up?
Every single video-related project I’ve tried to do has been a complete feast of terror. To date I’ve only been able to actually make one thing work.
Case Study 1: Video from ReplayTV to DVD
Software: iMovie, iDVD
Experience: Teeth-chatteringly Awful, But Ultimately Successful
A while back I decided to make a DVD version of the movie Yellowbeard. Inexplicably, there’s been no DVD release, and even VHS copies are like hen’s teeth on EBay. I managed to record it a few years back on my Replay, so I had a reasonable quality source that I wanted to transfer to DVD. I also wanted to make it close to a real DVD, so that meant some basic menus, chapter markers, that sort of thing.
Getting the video to my Mac was easy enough, using DVArchive to download the raw files, and using the Replay 5K toolchain to make clean MPEG-2 files from them. They’re MPEG2 already, but some bits need to be twiddled to make them fully compliant. I don’t pretend to understand this. Then I went to import these files into iMovie. Surprise! It doesn’t accept MPEG2 files. In fact, it doesn’t accept MPEG at all, or, in point of fact, anything other than Quicktime or DV. Uncompressed, huge-ass DV. Do I need to mention how completely absurd it is that a video editing application won’t accept the most popular video format in the world? So I had to use yet another utility to decompress the 96 minutes of video into DV format. Yeah, I had to buy a new hard drive for that. Once iMovie would open the video, things went reasonably smoothly; I laid out my chapter markers, and told it to export to iDVD. Then things went to hell again.
When you open up iDVD and create a new project, it creates one for you using its default template. The default template was, if I remember correctly, some completely absurd and insipid “kids theater” theme, complete with animated puppet show bullcrap flying around the screen (and grinding my G4 to a halt, incidentally). Um, no thanks. It’s relatively easy to find the “Customize” panel, where you are allowed to choose a new theme. You CANNOT choose no theme. You have to pick one of their prefab abominations, or you’re out of luck. You can’t make new ones, either. The best you can do is pick one of the less insipid ones, turn off the animated awfulness, replace the background images, etc. Well, this is okay to a point, but most parts of the DVD editing system are completely awful, and the parts that aren’t awful are implemented badly. For example, you can easily create new buttons that will link you to other parts of the DVD….but you have no tools to help you position them. Either the button goes in the location pre-destined for it in the theme you picked, or you can just drag it around your own self and try your best to eyeball it into something loosely approximating where you want it. No left/right/center/justify buttons, no grid to snap to, no “select-some-things-and-say-align” command…nothing. Then, once you’ve gotten your button placed, it may decide to keep it there and it may not. You may not find this out until you burn the DVD. It also lost the concept of direction at one point, such that when you pushed the “down” button it would pick a menu option to the left and so on. The only way to fix this was to delete all the menus and start over. Great. I ended up burning a whole assload of coasters, but I eventually got all the bugs beaten down enough to produce a single correct DVD. I have it on good authority that this sort of insanity (especially the “you can only use our templates thing”) is endemic to home DVD packages; Pinnacle, Ulead, and Nero all suffer some level of screwed-uppedness.
Case Study 2: Stolen TV to DVD
Software: Adobe Premier Elements
Experience: Crushing Failure
I downloaded some episodes of Star Trek with Bittorrent. I dragged and dropped them into Premier. Knowing that the menu editor in Elements is even worse than in iDVD (seriously), I told it to create a menuless, “Autoplay” DVD (something that iDVD can’t manage). It burned without incident. Popping the resultant DVD into the player, I had an hour’s worth of silent blackness. Hrm. I grumbled and fiddled around, downloaded a fresh version of the codec, and reburned. This time I got a picture. Occasionally. A very stuttery, half-speed picture and no sound. Thanks. I’ve since found out that when somebody writes a video codec, there are different API calls you have to implement for playback and editing. Apparently the dillweeds behind the Xvid and DivX codecs either didn’t bother to implement the editing calls, or screwed them all up. I’m basically boned there, unless I want to fix the drivers myself; the words “cold day in hell” come to mind in regards to that.
Case Study 3: Video from Camera to DVD
Software: Premier Elements, again
Experience: Hair-pulling Horribility
I just now tried to copy some video I took with my Cybershot P150 to a DVD. The video is ordinary-ass MPEG-1, 640×480. Can’t get much simpler than that. Couldn’t be hard, right? Unless you’re me. Dragging and dropping it into Premier results in a fascinatingly screwed up video; the audio works, and the video plays at regular speed, but it seems to randomly select a frame of video from a roughly 5 second range to either side of where it’s supposed to be playing. It’s a spastic and entirely useless performance. Mind this is on a mostly fresh install of XP Pro on a reasonably beefy box.
You know, as hard as VHS tapes sucked, they just worked. You hooked VCRs together with little wires, pushed Play on one and Record on another, and it was good. Is there any way to make this DVD thing not be so completely awful?
Oh, and also, Firefox seems to hate Tiger, or vice versa. It locks up like that’s it’s job ever since I upgraded.