After several months of DV abstinence, partly caused by an unprecedented attack of GarageBand eiphoria, partly - absence of footage of any value, due to rather eventless existance, I finally decided to return to the most time consuming of all of my activities, and make a movie again.
Following is a short summary of the experience.
I promise to keep this rant as technically oriented, as I can, in hope, that it might be of some benefit to fellow users. During nearly half of the year, which passed since my last cinematographic endevour, there were a couple of QuickTime updates, iPhoto update, and several system and security updates.
Current set-up:
System: Mac OS X (10.3.6)
iMovie 4.0.1
iDVD 4.0.1
QuickTime 6.2 (Pro)
iMac G4 800MHz 1GB RAM
Good things first: audio and video ARE in synk throughout the whole 1 hour and 39 minutes of the show. I would be thrilled, if it didn't happen before, but the good thing is that it's still there.
This is about it.
1. iMovie is as sluggish, as it used to be, when the length of the project exceeds 30 minutes. I was hoping, that QuickTime updates would improve the performance of the application, but they didn't.
2. Instead, a new (for me, at least), and very annoying bug was introduced: audio drops during transitions, and nothing can bring the level back to normal - manual adjustments to the transition clip volume graphs in timeline mode are simply ignored (I referred to Apple Knowledge Base, but couldn't find any applicable solution - all my clips were fresh from the camera, no volume adjustments before applying a transition). And a beginning of each transition now greets the unsuspected listener with a loud crack. Lovely.
The workaround: cut your clips to your liking, extract audio, turn off the sound for the whole video line, apply transitions, then manually graph the volumes of the extracted audio on the timeline. If you used clip-combining transition, like "Cross-Dissolve", you will have to re-align audio and video manually, and lock them together. Not difficult, but very time-consuming.
3. Saving the project sometimes empties the Trash. Sometimes doesn't. Since I usually empty the Trash as I go (when it's contents reach about a gigabyte in size), it's not a big problem for me; I, however, can imagine the frustration of those, who experienced all the Trash-related niceties, like corrupted projects, unrecoverable clips, etc.
The workaround: no clue. It didn't do it before, and might not do it after.
4. The quality of title rendering is still very sensitive to a color you pick.
The workaround: stay away from red and blue (purple, which I really needed for this project, is also forbidden), limit your creativity to white, yellow, and green.
5. The auto-sizing of titles, although, probably, a feature, not a bug, works in a very annoying way, when it comes to a "Multiple" title behavior. It scales each line/pair of lines separately, so the succession of titles on screen come in a delightful variety of sizes and placements (it also moves the baseline of text). I would expect the application to size the text by the longest line in the whole title, but, hey, it's just me. The workaround: playing with "size" slider helps, but it takes a lot of time, and there is always a danger of making text too small.
6. For some reason, iMovie developed a mind of it's own, which manifested itself in automatic creation of bookmarks in random places throughout the project. I deleted them, they never reappeared. Odd.
That concludes the movie-making experience. Now, iDVD:
Due to the lack of time, allocated to this particular project, I decided to use one of the third-party pre-cooked themes, rather than creating my own, which worked OK. In general. There were, however, some really entertaining moments:
1. The application is slow. You have to condition your mind, before starting to work with it. If you havn't entered the mental state of eternal observation, you will not survive the aggravation of waiting for the mouse click to sink in and get through.
2. Switching to "Preview" mode and travelling through the menus makes iDVD think that you changed something, and the project needs to be re-saved. It's minor, but annoying.
3. The "Stage 3: encoding assets" takes forever. Find another, not computer-related project to entertain yourself, like defrosting a large turkey, or growing a small beard.
4. After making first disk and testing it on a consumer DVD player, I realized, that I need to change one of the button labels. As I saved the project and put in another disk to burn, the program not only re-encoded ALL of the menus and transitions (not just the one I changed), but also ALL THE ASSETS (2 movies which I didn't touch), leaving me without a computer for another several hours.
Stupid is what stupid does, especially, if it takes 70% of CPU power.
5. Last, but not least: the "Burn" button, located in the botton right corner of the application window, is there for one and only reason - to enhance visual appeal of the interface. Clicking on it will open the "diaphragm" and make the "radiation sign" spin for a while, which, I admit, is very pretty. In several seconds, however, the "diaphragm" will close, leaving you with somewhat disturbing feeling of not having a clue of what just happened, because what just happened was nothing.
The workaround: If you really want to burn a disk, select the command from the menu. In my case, it started encoding menus, without even asking for the disk. I watched the progress bar for a while, then decided to put in a blank disk. Finder popped up a usual message, asking me what to with that disk, I reluctantly clicked "Ignore", and it worked.
This is pretty much all I learned during my latest and greatest project. Hope it might be of some use to somebody.
Have fun.
Following is a short summary of the experience.
I promise to keep this rant as technically oriented, as I can, in hope, that it might be of some benefit to fellow users. During nearly half of the year, which passed since my last cinematographic endevour, there were a couple of QuickTime updates, iPhoto update, and several system and security updates.
Current set-up:
System: Mac OS X (10.3.6)
iMovie 4.0.1
iDVD 4.0.1
QuickTime 6.2 (Pro)
iMac G4 800MHz 1GB RAM
Good things first: audio and video ARE in synk throughout the whole 1 hour and 39 minutes of the show. I would be thrilled, if it didn't happen before, but the good thing is that it's still there.
This is about it.
1. iMovie is as sluggish, as it used to be, when the length of the project exceeds 30 minutes. I was hoping, that QuickTime updates would improve the performance of the application, but they didn't.
2. Instead, a new (for me, at least), and very annoying bug was introduced: audio drops during transitions, and nothing can bring the level back to normal - manual adjustments to the transition clip volume graphs in timeline mode are simply ignored (I referred to Apple Knowledge Base, but couldn't find any applicable solution - all my clips were fresh from the camera, no volume adjustments before applying a transition). And a beginning of each transition now greets the unsuspected listener with a loud crack. Lovely.
The workaround: cut your clips to your liking, extract audio, turn off the sound for the whole video line, apply transitions, then manually graph the volumes of the extracted audio on the timeline. If you used clip-combining transition, like "Cross-Dissolve", you will have to re-align audio and video manually, and lock them together. Not difficult, but very time-consuming.
3. Saving the project sometimes empties the Trash. Sometimes doesn't. Since I usually empty the Trash as I go (when it's contents reach about a gigabyte in size), it's not a big problem for me; I, however, can imagine the frustration of those, who experienced all the Trash-related niceties, like corrupted projects, unrecoverable clips, etc.
The workaround: no clue. It didn't do it before, and might not do it after.
4. The quality of title rendering is still very sensitive to a color you pick.
The workaround: stay away from red and blue (purple, which I really needed for this project, is also forbidden), limit your creativity to white, yellow, and green.
5. The auto-sizing of titles, although, probably, a feature, not a bug, works in a very annoying way, when it comes to a "Multiple" title behavior. It scales each line/pair of lines separately, so the succession of titles on screen come in a delightful variety of sizes and placements (it also moves the baseline of text). I would expect the application to size the text by the longest line in the whole title, but, hey, it's just me. The workaround: playing with "size" slider helps, but it takes a lot of time, and there is always a danger of making text too small.
6. For some reason, iMovie developed a mind of it's own, which manifested itself in automatic creation of bookmarks in random places throughout the project. I deleted them, they never reappeared. Odd.
That concludes the movie-making experience. Now, iDVD:
Due to the lack of time, allocated to this particular project, I decided to use one of the third-party pre-cooked themes, rather than creating my own, which worked OK. In general. There were, however, some really entertaining moments:
1. The application is slow. You have to condition your mind, before starting to work with it. If you havn't entered the mental state of eternal observation, you will not survive the aggravation of waiting for the mouse click to sink in and get through.
2. Switching to "Preview" mode and travelling through the menus makes iDVD think that you changed something, and the project needs to be re-saved. It's minor, but annoying.
3. The "Stage 3: encoding assets" takes forever. Find another, not computer-related project to entertain yourself, like defrosting a large turkey, or growing a small beard.
4. After making first disk and testing it on a consumer DVD player, I realized, that I need to change one of the button labels. As I saved the project and put in another disk to burn, the program not only re-encoded ALL of the menus and transitions (not just the one I changed), but also ALL THE ASSETS (2 movies which I didn't touch), leaving me without a computer for another several hours.
Stupid is what stupid does, especially, if it takes 70% of CPU power.
5. Last, but not least: the "Burn" button, located in the botton right corner of the application window, is there for one and only reason - to enhance visual appeal of the interface. Clicking on it will open the "diaphragm" and make the "radiation sign" spin for a while, which, I admit, is very pretty. In several seconds, however, the "diaphragm" will close, leaving you with somewhat disturbing feeling of not having a clue of what just happened, because what just happened was nothing.
The workaround: If you really want to burn a disk, select the command from the menu. In my case, it started encoding menus, without even asking for the disk. I watched the progress bar for a while, then decided to put in a blank disk. Finder popped up a usual message, asking me what to with that disk, I reluctantly clicked "Ignore", and it worked.
This is pretty much all I learned during my latest and greatest project. Hope it might be of some use to somebody.
Have fun.