I spent the day today producing a DVD for my aunt who is an extremely talented pastel artist. She was interviewed recently by an arts program on PBS and wanted to use the piece as promotion for getting gigs at museums and art shows. I’ve done one DVD before this using Adobe Encore so it wasn’t hard to step back into it and re-acquaint myself with the interface (using an Adobe interface is about like riding a bike in terms of how it all generally comes back). One issue that popped up, though, was that my sound track was not syncing up with the video track and unfortunately it wasn’t simply off by a consistent delay, it was inconsistently off so that it was impossible to timeshift the track to fix it. It turned out that for whatever reason re-ripping the original video file as an .mpg rather than an .avi fixed the prob. I use a $30 shareware program called AVS Video Converter to rip video media and it works well. I used Encore to put the DVD together and generate the .iso file. Then I use the version of Nero that came w/ my burner (6.6 I think) to burn that image to DVD. With all the ripping, decoding, transcoding, re-encoding that went on today, it’s sure surprising they haven’t been able to make this a simpler process. It ended up taking nearly all day to get it right. From what I understand the Mac DVD burning software is idiot-proof and makes the whole thing a snap. Yet another reason I now have in order to make the switch and get one of those new Mac laptops…

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