laneys.info Beware of Yankees, drunks, and loose women.

No, I've been to the movies before, I'm talking about making a movie. Okay, and it's really my second. I have always had a love for movies and how they're made. I made a movie once before for my church in 1997, and they asked me to do it again a few weeks ago. The biggest difference is that in 1997 I was one of three people that worked on the video - Julie and Gil were the other two. Gil took the lead on the last video, which made a lot of sense, with him having been a mass communications major in college and all.

This one was not only all mine, but I lost track of when the deadline was and ended up having less than two weeks to put it all together. Yikes! Fortunately, a lot of this second video was composed of still photos that I was basically putting into a slide show format with some full-motion video added in for good measure.

Building the video actually went pretty well. I had versions of Sonic MyDVD and ArcSoft's Showbiz that came with my DVD burner, and they worked very smoothly. Showbiz is the piece that does the video editing, and it was very easy to use. I got finished around 6:00 PM on Saturday, which is about 12 hours sooner than Julie thought I would. I rendered the movie to an MPEG-2 file with very little compression, which I put onto my flash drive. Then, I exported the video to MyDVD and burned it to a DVD. I tested both to make sure they played fine, then relaxed.

The next morning, I had to take the movie so I could show it in the Sunday morning worship service. I got about halfway to the church when I realized that I had forgotten the DVD. Oops. At least I still had the flash drive and the MPEG-2 file.

I got the church and loaded up the MPEG and tested it. The video started playing. Silence. Oh, well, the computer's sound card wasn't plugged in. We fixed that. Still silence. We switched out of Media Shout and used Windows Media Player. Silence. Quicktime. Silence. Real Player. Silence. Finally, we switched back to Windows Media Player and checked for error messages. There was a problem with the audio codec.

Bottom line is, it appears that ArcSoft used some funky, non-standard audio codec for rendering their MPEG-2 video file. We never did find one that would work, so we put a CD in and played something completely different as a soundtrack to the video. It wouldn't have been that big of a deal, except that I had spent four days choosing the soundtrack and several hours getting some of the edits to match up to the changes in the music.

I'm ditching ArcSoft. Next editing job I have to do, I'm going to try using Avid's FreeDV product. Avid makes professional editing software, and this is their foot-in-the-door, free version. It should produce good results, but that's what I thought about ArcSoft Showbiz, too. Blech.