It all started simply enough.  In early November my Uncle’s granddaughter turned one year old and we had her birthday party.  During the party, I ran around with a video camera recording everything so that I could make a nice video of the occasion.  The taping went well; I captured well over an hour of footage.  My plan was to take it down to a ten-minute video which I would put on DVD using iDVD.  I would present this, together with a photo book from iPhoto, as a Christmas present to the parents and grandparents.

The first problem I had was importing the video into iMovie.  My camera was one of those DVD burning models, and it turns out that Mac OS X is not capable of reading those natively.  I had to download a number of applications, each one costing a little money in order to read a DVD created by the camcorder.  No matter, I bought the applications (spending upwards of $100) and imported the video.

Over the next couple of weeks, I spent a few hours a day editing the video. You must understand this was my first video editing project, and also my first use of iMovie, so it was slow going, as I learned the ins and outs of the software.  But I was surprised as to how easy things were.  I’m no Francis Ford Coppola, but I was able to put together some basic edits, splice in audio, add bumpers, titles and captions, and ultimately create something that looked less like your average raw home video and more like a finished production.

With about a week to go, I had my movie.  At that point, all I had to do was add some music and create a DVD.  I had been spending time at the Apple Store looking at their workshops to see if I could get some tips on how to continue my project, and one of them showed how GarageBand is particularly useful for something like this.  So I opened up GarageBand (which has a movie soundtrack editing feature), pulled in my video and added some music.  GarageBand has a large library of readymade jingles which can be used in your projects royalty free.  I made liberal use of their jingles.  After a day or two, I was happy with my video, complete with musical score.

By this time I had just a couple of days to create my DVD so I would have enough time to label it, get the case for it, and wrap it together with the photo book.  The photo book had already arrived, so that part was taking care of.  All I had to do was create the DVD.  I launched iDVD and got to work. iDVD was fairly easy, especially since it imported my movie from GarageBand.  It had already done the chapter menu so all I had to do was select a menu theme.  I also wanted to add some photos which iDVD took care of in no time.  Within about 20 minutes my DVD was authored.  Now to burn it.

Before burning the DVD, I went through the preview mode just to check out if everything was OK.  Everything seemed to check out fine, so I hit the burn button.  About an hour later, the DVD was ready.  I put it into my DVD player with anticipation, ready to see the fruits of my labor.  The menu came up just as I had designed it.  I went to the photo gallery first, it worked very well.  Then it was time to see the main feature.  I selected it from the menu, and it began to play.  Success!  But wait, what’s this?  Why is there no sound?  I checked the preview in iDVD one more time.  There was audio in the preview, so why was there no audio on the DVD?

I was baffled, this made no sense.  Against my better judgment, I tried burning another DVD.  Still no audio.  Now I was beginning to panic; I didn’t have much time to be dealing with an error like this, just a couple of days before Christmas.  In lieu of burning and wasting more DVD’s I decided to try creating images.  I tried everything I could think of, including scouring the Apple’s support knowledge base for potential solutions. I did find one or two solutions, but image after image exhibited the same problem.  Finally, late on Christmas Eve, I admitted defeat.  My PowerBook’s hard drive was filled with a growing pile of non-working DVD images (each one taking at least an hour to render) and I was still no closer to solving the problem of no audio during the main feature.

The next day, dejected, and still with no working DVD, I was forced to give them just the photo book.  They had to lug around a large PowerBook to see the video that I had made for them.  To this date, I still do not have a working DVD of the video I spent so much time making.  My next tactic is to go to the Apple Store and ask one of the geniuses there for help.  Suffice to say I was in a huge funk over the Christmas break, because the present I had worked so hard to make didn’t work.

Now, whenever I see one of those Apple commercials, I feel like reaching into the screen and strangling Justin Long.  “Macs are great for podcasts and photo books and videos.” Yeah right, whatever you say there, pal.