Holidays 2008 Production

Chinese New Year marks the first chapter of a Holiday DVD I produce annually. I began this as a 2005 New Year's resolution, after converting some old home videos from the 90's to DVD. I realized that there was a large gap. We consistently captured family occasions from 1990-1995, then stopped because the old Hi-8 camera was on its last legs. We did buy a new Digital-8 camera to replace it in 2000, but really just used that for vacations. In 2005, I found a very portable DivX camera on sale and made the resolution to get the home videos going again. The DivX camera just made things easier because it was small enough to fit into my pocket, so there was no excuse for not having it with me. It saved directly to the built-in hard drive, so I didn't have to spend time doing the video capture. It wasn't great though. The quality didn't match DV and it was difficult for my programs to read the format properly (it was probably some custom version of DivX 4.0). I eventually found a way around it by converting to MPEG-1 first, then upconverting to MPEG-2 for DVD.

The 2008 edition will have a number of changes. First of all, I'm pushing for the DV format and will make extra effort to lug around the larger camera. I'm going more after the better quality than portability now that I've created a number of nice looking vacation DVDs on iMovie/iDVD. Holidays 2008 will also be the first 16:9 video I shoot as more and more people are moving over to widescreen LCDs.

iMovie/iDVD Tips (Part 2)

6) Don't move your movie from iMovie to iDVD until all of your titles and chapters are set. If chapter markers get deleted or added, the change will not be reflected in iDVD and you'll have to start a new project. Deleting a title can sometimes result in a chapter deletion too.

7) Don't do any slideshows until the main movie is absolutely complete and error free. If for some reason you need to start a new DVD project, you can't move the slideshows from one project to another. You have to rebuild them from scratch.

8) If you choose an iDVD theme with animated menus, the first thing you should do is disable the animation. It eats up a ton of file space.

9) When laying out menu items in iDVD, keep in mind that it will work in order of height and not left to right.

10) If you're previewing the DVD in iDVD, the sound will disappear for some of the titles. Don't worry... it'll be correct when the actual DVD is processed.

iMovie/iDVD Tips (Part 1)

As I'm working on my vacation videos, I just wanted to note some iMovie/iDVD tips along the way so that others can benefit from this information and so there's some place for me to look back for future reference.

1) When capturing the video, make sure you break it up into a lot of clips because you can use each clip only once. You can't have a long clip, crop it twice and place a transition in between.

2) After the capture is done, layout all of the clips on the timeline and crop each clip. It's safer to do this before adding any transitions, titles or fx. If you start doing transitions and then have to crop later, you'll not only lose the transition, but the clip sometimes gets a short mini-clip subtracted out and this mini-clip is too short to take a transition.

3) Save often, especially before rendering titles or video fx. There's a slight chance iMovie will crash for no reason at all.

4) When editing titles, sometimes the program will give you a hard time with refreshing updated previews. Just toggle the black background checkbox on and off.

5) When working on titles or DVD menus, check the TV safe area often. All of the text items and buttons should fall within those boundaries to work on conventional TVs... computers will display everything, but TVs tend to cutoff edges.