When Lia's birth was imminent, Linda and I purchased a camcorder so that we could record all her cute little moments as she grew up. We've done a lot of recording, (example) but my goal had always been to edit the video we'd made into a DVD and send copies out to family.
My major in college was Communication, with an emphasis on Mass Media. What does that mean? Video editing. I worked a paid internship at FOX-61 in Hartford for a couple years, editing commercials and late night B-movies amongst other things. I've made dozens of music videos as class projects and just for fun. Using VHS tape, I've done hundreds if not thousands of hours of video editing. But I can't for the life of me get video editing on a PC to work.
I've been trying all summer. First I tried using the software that came with the camera. It brings over the clips from the camera as mpeg files - one file each time you stop recording. And if you want chapters in your dvd, it requires you to combine those mpeg files into one mpeg per chapter. Needless to say, it's an extremely laborious and time-consuming procedure. I did that once, and produced a DVD with no menus and no real editing. It sucked.
After that, I tried various shareware, open-source, and trial version softwares, but they were all crap. A couple packages would crash constantly, another had the worst user interface I'd ever seen, another would let me set things up perfectly, but then didn't see my DVD burners. I was beginning to think that all DVD authoring software was crap. Actually, I kind of still do think that.
So I chatted with PMD, who said he'd used Pinnacle Studio on and off a few times, and seems to have liked it. I bought an old version from EBay for $20. What that came in, I quickly realized that I wouldn't be able to use my MPEGs without paying for the special MPEG codecs. Another $20 to unlock software that turns out to have been already installed on my machine. What a con they've got going there.
So now, I set up my whole DVD via a process that took about two full days. Huge learning curve, but okay - now it's set up. I click burn. Three hours later: render error. Every time I try to burn: render error.
I've gone on the forums and tried a number of different solutions, each of which takes 3-5 hours before I realize that it has failed. The newest thing I've got to try: rendering each chapter into its own AVI file, then stringing those AVI files together into a new project to burn to a DVD image. The only problem is that when I set the thing up to render an AVI file, the button to start the procedure is disabled. Why??
I think I'm going crazy