Smithee Mega Meta III show is done! And yes, I know that’s a duplicate of something I’ve already said, but this time I mean it’s REALLY done. Done, Debugged and Duplicated.<\/p>\n
The debugging part was no tougher than it should have been. There’s always going to be the standard stuff that crops up when watching the full show for the first time. Little things like half-frame blips at the end or beginning of a clip, or screwy sound levels. Even the bigger things, like having the wrong selection menu show up at the end of a category, are fairly easy to correct.<\/p>\n
The problem I ran into was at the duplication stage.<\/p>\n
We’ve got this sweet<\/i> DVD duplicator \/ printer at the office – it’s the sort of thing you can queue up with a stack of fifty discs and let run overnight. It feeds discs into a high-speed burner along a conveyor belt, which then reverses course and runs the finished disc through a nice inkjet printer. It comes with some customized software to drive the whole thing, and unfortunately that’s the weak spot.<\/p>\n
Charismac Discribe<\/a> just flat-out won’t burn a video DVD correctly. Every one I’ve tried has worked fine in a computer, but has failed in a set-top DVD player. I’ve come up with a work-around though: burn a master disc using the DVD creating software, and then have Discribe duplicate the correctly burnt disc. This is slow, but it works.<\/p>\n In addition to being slow, another downside to this is that if you’ve got multiple discs that you want to make multiple copies of (say, for example, a Smithee show that spans two discs), you have to do them as two separate queues.<\/p>\n Anyway, this was all complicated by a second flaw I found, this time in Toast<\/a>. If you include any of the invisible files (like .DSstore) on your final DVD, it can cause serious playback problems. If you’re using Toast, just delete them from the burn list. You’ll save yourself tons of headaches.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Smithee Mega Meta III show is done! And yes, I know that’s a duplicate of something I’ve already said, but this time I mean it’s REALLY done. Done, Debugged and Duplicated. The debugging part was no tougher than it should … Continue reading