Wasted

Another wasted weekend trying to get iDVD to work. I appreciate there's a 4.0.1 update, but I didn't have that this weekend, and can't generally download this kind of thing from home because it takes too long.

I had similar experiences with iDVD 3 when it first came out - for 6 months, I was unable to complete a project with it because it "hung" at the burning stage. The .01 update fixed this, but it was a long wait.

I guess this update may fix the problem I was having this weekend (which was identical, give or take, to the original version 3 problem), but it hit me between the eyes what a colossal waste of time iDVD really is.

When Apple first announced that they'd made some software that enabled you to make your own DVD projects at home, it seemed like a miracle. Just incredible to take your digital camcorder footage, edit it together (and iMovie is still the best software ever), and stick it on a DVD. Still a fantastic way to share photos and videos with grandparents.

But there's the rub. Your own home videos, unless you're an indie film maker doing a showreel, are of interest to a very few people. Unless you are a professional or semi-professional wedding videographer, the use you make of something like iDVD is relatively light.

And the thing is, it's like taking all day to cook a meal and then 10 minutes to eat it. The effort and time involved in production does not scale with the time spent on consumption. I wasted hours of my life waiting for MPEG video to (fail to) encode and burn. Finally, I gave up and went back to iDVD 3.0.1, another few hours, and I ran off three copies.

And after all those hours, what did I have but about 20 minutes of home movies, plus another 8 minutes or so of photo slide show. Half an hour, and you're done, and how often, really, are you going to dip into those?

OK, I'm doing it on an 800MHz G4, which isn't going to set the world on fire with its speed, but again, how much am I willing to spend on a faster machine in order to make that 30 minute DVD project I look at once or twice a year? It's all, ridiculously, out of proportion.

At least with my Pro Tools recording setup, I use it several times a week, and get real ongoing pleasure out of it. I feel out of step with the times though. We live in a visual age, things are supposed to move in front of your eyes. But I'm the same with feature films: watch it once, and I'm generally done. Music on the other hand, I can play quite a few times before I get sick of it...