A few years into our Disney meets, I started making DVDs of the photos everyone took. For whatever reason, I didn’t do one for 2008. Just couldn’t get into the mood. Then it was the 2009 meet and I figured I’d just do them together. Then I wrecked my car. Then my computer crashed.
It was always something.
I wanted them to be out in the mail last week. Not done. I had forgotten how time consuming it is to find the best pictures and fixing any problems with them, resizing them, etc. I finally got that done and started making the video. I found old plugins and reinstalled them into my video software. I searched for new plugins and installed those. And I got busy.
Now, we’ve had a great summer, very, very mild. A few really hot days, but on the average, the high temperature is low for this time of the year. There have been multiple record lows. The office is the hottest room in the house. With the computers, the burners, printers and all, it all adds to the heat from the sun.
And wouldn’t you know, once I started sitting here everyday, it got hot. Even with the A/C on, it was in the nineties. Indoors. In the office. Triple digits outside. I was miserable. Then I’d get one portion of the project finished, it would cool off. I got the video made with Corel’s Video Studio Pro V3. I made the menus (and I’m not happy with them, but time’s getting too short to redo them right now) with Ulead’s Movie Factory 6. Then I was ready to burn the copies.
My burners didn’t work. Well, they worked, but the last time I did this, I was able to burn three at a time. This time it was only two. Same burners. Very annoying. So, I settled for two at a time, and burned ten from a copy on my hard drive. In the heat. The day after I burned them, it cooled down again. Nice. I tested the DVDs. All coasters. However they were saved to the hard drive, they didn’t transfer to the actual disk in a viewable format. I had to redo them all.
It got hot.
I found another way to burn them (downloaded more trial software) and the test disk worked. But the software kept crapping out.
I did a system restore and all the tweaking I’d done during making this software was lost. *sigh*
I had to uninstall some of the software and reinstall (there’s been a problem with net.framework ever since the computer crashed back in May and it wasn’t a problem until I needed to work with the software; I had fixed this during the past couple of weeks, but the system restore undid it). Then I used WinUtilities and cleaned the registry. Then I did a defrag. Then I burned the disks. And they work! Yay!
Yesterday, I printed on them (that’s another speed bump, I couldn’t find the right settings and the printing job wasn’t smooth). The disks are done, I designed the cover insert and printed those out, have to trim them and put them in the DVD case, then do an insert and they’ll be ready to send off.
Okay, break over!
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