11pm on a Sunday

Actually, that’s not entirely true.  I made a DVD of some random show to watch on my TV, which was a bigger pain than I had imagined.  I don’t own any sort of easy DVD creation software.  I own Sony DVD Creator Pro, which is about as far from easy as one can get.  In particular one must have the video in the correct format ahead of time which is then converted once again to the appropriate on-disk format for a DVD.  I had to convert the .mkv to MPEG-2 with a utility outside of Vegas.  Unfortunately said utility doesn’t give fine control over bit rate so the video file ends up surprisingly small when converted, but massively expanded beyond a single-layer DVD when converted to the appropriate DVD-Video format.  I had re-encode the video once again, from MPEG-2 to MPEG-2 but with the appropriate magic to make it perfect for DVD use.  All in all, it took a couple of hours to convert a couple of hours worth of video, even though it takes only 20 minutes for each transcode.

 

Actually, I shouldn’t complain about DVD Creator Pro too much as creating the DVD was just as simple as dragging the video file from the media bin to the menu tree and then tweaking a few parameters.  The major pain with the software is the specific set of video formats the software will accept.  It’s similar with other, friendlier software, except that most of those include a bit more format conversion software.

 

For my next project, I’m going to redo the DVD and make it look more “professional”.  Sadly, that’s actually a long and drawn out process as one has to watch the video and carefully note the points where chapter markers should be placed.  While I could have done that the first time through, I wanted to watch it on the 42“ set rather than on a computer screen which made that idea rather silly and as such I left the video with no chapter markers.  If the video didn’t have hard-coded subtitles, I would attempt that as well.  DVD production skills seems like it might be worthwhile to learn.

 

That’s it for the weekend.