Temp: 24 degrees
Not bad weather today, but I was on a mission and had no time to spend in the sun.
I dug out an old Typhus performance at Studebakers pub, back in 1996 and this was going to be my first attempt at digitizing an old Hi-* tape and making a DVD out of it.
After wrangling all the required cables, getting all the input settings correct, and fudging the mono audio source, I was ready to begin. Okay, not exactly... a few more tweaks of capture rate, video quality, etc, and NOW I was ready... okay, so I'm almost two hours into the project now, so I press record and let the tape play...
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55 minutes later, I've captured the video and it's in my computer ready to become a DVD!
Now all I've got to do is chop it into chapters, create a menu, figure out what all the song names were, create titles, text overlays, create a disc image, then burn a DVD ...
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...
Three more hours pass, and I think I've got a final product I'm happy with - time to burn!
Thirty minutes later, the DVD pops out, with an unrecoverable write error. Dang, I'll have to start the burn over. I grab one of my highest quality DVDs, after all if this is going to be a master, I want it to last... maybe the problem was with the crappy generic DVD I had used before. Thirty more minutes later, and the DVD pops out with a successful burn. hooray! Let's try it out ... what the... it's only coming out of the left speaker - I thought I fixed the mono problem... that's strange - plus, there's a white line through the middle of every song - I swear that wasn't there when I was mastering... oh well, it has now been about seven hours and I need to stretch.
The good news is, it DID kinda work - I now have a DVD version of the olf Hi-8 tape that has nice menus and chapters so you can jump right to the song you want. And the quality's pretty darned good too, even with the mono audio and thin white line ... maybe this is good enough?
If you know me, you know I'm a perfectionist - but you know what it'll take to re-do this? I'll have to buy a ne cable to split the mono signal into two paths, and I'll have to re-capture, re-master, and re-burn the whole thing - that means ANOTHER full day of work ... I'm not looking forward to that.
I think I'll try a different video next week, and if it turns out great, maybe, just maybe I'll go back and re-do this one some day. Until then, I've still got plenty of work ahead of me.
Oh, and then Carole reminds me that I'll need to make nifty cases and sleeves for all these DVDs if I wanna give 'em out ... AHHHHHH!!!! I'll be busy doing this project until Christmas!
Well, at least it's not Need For Speed...