Football and Milestones

I'm tired, but I'm going to try to stop complaining about the amount of time I'm having to devote at work.

My very first eBay seller's auction has started. I'm selling a pair of Cowboys/Lions tickets. It's sort of exciting to have it out there waiting to be bid on. I don't know if we'll get the final bids other similar-value tickets are getting, mainly because I have no seller history out there yet, so people will not have the same comfort level buying from me.

My daughters also celebrated their 1000-day birthday Saturday. We were going to make a cake, but we didn't. We had some coffee cake left over from the previous night for breakfast which seemed to be a hit. The counter on my web page needs a little help now that we've rolled over into four digits, but it won't take too long to fix.

My iMac is also about to celebrate its 20th day in my house.

Its counter, too, will need help after today. As far as the computer itself goes, the only problem I have had is with the Bluetooth module. It does not consistently engage, so that about 60% of the time the wireless keyboard is not recognized. I'll have to take it in to get serviced, but now that it's our Primary Computer, I don't want to go back to my G3 if I can help it. Maybe if it's just gone for a week, I can manage it.

We've burned two different DVD slideshows, one for some of our friends and one of my sister's wedding, without problems. We were able to do this quickly, since we just went straight from iPhoto and iTunes to iDVD, using the built-in templates. The results have been pretty nice.

My next project is to edit my sister's wedding video into a more concise DVD. My dad sent a two-disc DVD version of all the raw footage of the wedding and associated events - about three hours worth. That's really too long to be very watchable, so I'm going to give a shot at editing it with iMovie.

I'm used to iMovie (although I've not used the new version much), but getting the DVD video into iMovie took some doing:

1. Converted the DVD video into an MPEG4 video using Handbrake
2. Opened the converted video with Quicktime Pro
3. Ran a script to convert the MPEG4 video into DV streams that are no longer than 9 minutes long
4. Placed the DV stream files into a blank iMovie project's Media folder

Item 1 took some time because I had to learn what conversions settings worked, and each attempt took several hours for each DVD disc. Item 2 worked fine, but it also took as long as the DVD clip was to complete (1.5 hours per disc).

The editing will take some time, just because I have three hours of raw footage, including 80 minutes of reception footage. I have to go through and identify the parts I need to include in the DVD intact (ceremony, best man toast, cake cutting, etc.), and then I can slice and dice the rest. I figure the final product will be no more than 45 minutes total, with chapter markers so you can easily jump to the part you want.

At 1.8 GB per 9 minutes of footage, this is also taking up a whopping 36 GB of hard disk space. That's a pretty good motivator to get this project completed.

Posted by Rob Reid at October 18, 2004 11:49 AM