A Sad Tale of a DVD Production - but All's Well That End's Well - so I've heard!

Jennifer had a Murphy's Law story the other day. Here's mine! It began when Bev asked me if I could do a DVD for them for their anniversary...

I enjoy working with the program (Roxio) and have made 5 or 6 DVD's so I said sure! The hardest part was not copying the 180 or so pictures that she wanted - I setup the Nikon on a copy stand and made relatively short work of that. Getting them in decent order was a challenge and Bev had to help with that. Then we had to get the music in and sync the pictures to the music. It took another week to decide on the music but finally it was on and it started coming together - the pictures, the movement (pan and zoom) within the pictures, the transitions, and the sync. That's the fun part!

But, when the project was about 85% complete I started getting error messages and program shutdowns. I didn't think I was going to get it done but finally did although I lost some of what was done and Bev had to help arrange pictures again. I played it through completely on the PC (about 14 minutes worth) and it was all good. Then I burned the DVD. Problem - nothing on the DVD. Did everything I could think of, it looked OK, but nothing on the DVD. So I finally talked to the owner of Bulldog Computers here in Quitman. The error message prompted for a CD but I didn't have one as the program was on the PC when I bought it at Bulldog. Thomas said it was a known error. I took in the PC, he did the reconfigure that was prompted for in the error message and it should be good. Brought it home. DVD would not burn.

Talked to Thomas again and he said to bring it back and he would uninstall and reinstall the program. He did that and, being the nice guy that Thomas is, he upgraded me from Version 7 to Version 9 in the process. He even put in another DVD drive just to be on the safe side. (Thomas is not accepting any money for all of this.) Version 9 looked a lot different so I learned the program again and finally realized that the "make a DVD" function is turned off in the trial copy of Version 9. Thomas says to bring it back and he'll put Version 7 back on it but I decided to just start from scratch on Glynda's PC. It has the same program and she has Version 7.

Now you can't just email or transfer the file to another PC. It does not actually save the pictures until you burn the DVD, it saves the picture address so if you put it on another PC - it's nothing but "can't find the picture" messages. I put the pictures and music on a couple CD's and loaded the pictures on Glynda's computer and put in another 4 or 5 hours on the new copy. It was moving along OK but then, sitting at Glynda's PC, I crossed my legs. It's a little tight there and when I did that, I kicked the DVD player door that was open. I kicked it pretty good and broke it pretty good! So now, I'm not gonna be able to burn the DVD when I get it finished.

I packed up my PC and Glynda's PC and took them to Thomas. He said "You did what?" A few hours later I picked-up both PC's - mine now with Version 7 of the program, Glynda's with a new DVD drive. (Thomas did charge $40 for the new drive and $20 to install it. He said the old one that was stuck in the half-open position didn't want to come out!)

Back home I hooked them both up. Started up the DVD program on mine, open the Bev&Alex file, burned it to a DVD, and - Success!!!! It burned!!! I've even done some more editing now to make it even better and burned a couple copies of that. It's all good! (Wonder if I'm gonna, some day, start getting that error message again?)