Perhaps you recall months ago when I was in the village and doing a Luke recording in the Ura language. Things went amazingly smoothly. I got an email from someone who had done dubbing before and said 'I've had those recordings when things go really well, and it's because you're covered in prayer, but often times the post production work gets riddled with all kinds of odd happenings... be sure to ask people for prayer during that time too.'
I tell you, the post production on this DVD has been almost nightmarish with how many things have gone wrong with it.
-Rendering the video on the Mac, which is normally a rather easy thing, was very complicated. The ratios, the codec, nothing seemed to be compatible between the original video, Final Cut Pro, and DVD Studio Pro. I ended up, for every episode, going through a 3 render process.
FIRST sync it in Final Cut - render 2 hours
Then convert it in Compressor- render 1 hour
Then open it in DVD Studio pro and create the DVD menus and burn it - render 4 hours.
I had to do this 16 times.
THEN after that was figured out and done:
-First pass, none of the audio was to spec, and had to all be remixed and approved - this took a month
-Second pass audio was approved, but then I had to go back into the rendering loop above which I had completed a month before.
only this time....
-We had power issues and the UPS system went down and so did all my network attached storage, so all my renders were corrupt and/or render was interrupted.
You may ask:
?Why are you using network attached storage?
A. Because I have no space on the local machine, I've patched together a rendering box as DVD mastering is not something we do a lot of here. It's hobbled together and I think next time I will outsource it.
?Why are you using a Mac?
A. Well, the P.C. software suite is Adobe and it costs like $1500 for the software that would all work. I started on the Mac because I know the DVD Studio Pro software, and it was easy, the only problem was.... for some reason, the video doesn't like to talk to the other apps.... primarily because the video came from a Windows machine and the codecs and ratios, and all of that seem to confuse the Mac. It's the first time I've ever seen it at this level, and I figured it all out, but it took a while to get it to all jive properly.
Anyway... long story short....
EVEN without any more errors in the mix, it'll take me at least another week of straight rendering before I can think about producing a DVD.
Please pray that there are no more.... 'incidents' as it may in fact be a spiritual battle going on here.
thanks
