Yeah, I know yesterday was Tuesday, but…

You may remember my post from last week, “The One Thing You Cannot Do on a Mac.”

So, I had this brilliant idea.

I have an older Mac that I rarely use anymore. It had a CD/DVD drive, and I’ve burned CDs with it before, so I checked to see if it would also burn DVDs.

Yay! It does.

So, I copy over the files from the one computer over to the older one. A slow process over the network, but I did other things while I waited.

Then I put in a DVD to burn it.

And it started burning the disk! Yay! The progress bar moved and progressed. Yay!

Then I left the room and, when I came back, discovered the DVD had been ejected and the screen had gone blank.

It had gone into power save mode, and the burn failed due to a communication error, which is error number 0×80020022.

Okay, so try again. Turn power save off. Turn sleep settings off. Nothing should interfere this time with the burning of the disk.

Put the DVD in. Start burning. Yay! Phone rings. I leave the room and, when I return, the burning of the disk has failed again. Same 0×80020022 error. Clearly, it wasn’t the power save mode or the sleep settings.

Ugh.

Tried a different brand. The original brand I started with that wouldn’t work on the other computer any more.

Lo and behold, it worked.

But, would it work for a second DVD?

Of course not. It stopped at 96.6% with the same 0×80020022 error.

And so the wasted DVDs continue to pile up…

I have used and had Macintosh computers for ages.

Never really have much problems with them. There was one machine that was kind of flaky (G3), but most have been virtually flawless.

Everything I’ve needed to do I’ve been able to do just fine on a Mac.

However, I’ve discovered there is one thing you cannot do on a Mac, at least not reliably.

And that is to burn DVDs.

I burned my first DVD shortly after getting my MacBook Pro a couple years ago. Worked fine.

I’ve burned CDs on a regular basis. Continue to do so. No problems there!

But, then I start trying to archive my data to DVDs. No such luck. I don’t remember how many DVDs I wasted before throwing in the towel.

They all fail with the dreaded 0×8002006E error—a problem for which, judging by the support forums I have read, has no solution.

Changing burn speeds has no effect. Some recommend deleting the com.apple.finder.plist file to solve the problem. No such luck there either. Some have long lists of things to do, which are so ridiculously long and non-sensible, they might as well be considered computer voodoo.

Another recommendation was to try a different brand of DVD. Ironically, the recommended brand, Verbatim, is the one which I was using. (Which is also the brand of CDs I use, which burn without any problems.) So, I tried a house brand from a computer company I’ve purchased from and trust. They guarantee the DVDs will work.

I bought a ten-pack to try them out.

They burned fine. No problems.

Thinking my problems were solved, I bought a fifty-pack of the same brand.

So far, I’ve wasted 6 DVDs trying to burn the things. Each gets the 0×8002006E error.

Might as well have taken my money and burned it.

Yet another suggestion to resolve the problem is to free up hard drive space. Well, what the heck do you think I was trying to do by archiving files to DVD?

So, um, yeah. Macs are wonderful. Macs are great. Macs are largely trouble-free.

Just as long as you don’t need to burn a DVD.

Maybe I should look at getting an external Blu-ray drive.

I made my first DVD, and got it right on the first try! It was nice not to waste any DVDs!

On the downside, I discovered box of DVDs I had purchased a couple months ago had only 14 DVDs in it, instead of 20. Too late, probably, to complain to the company I ordered from. I ordered a 20-pack, and they sent me a single DVD. I eMailed to tell them about it, and they immediately sent out a box. Now, I discover I was still shorted! Argh!!! Don’t know how I didn’t notice; I guess it was because the box felt full.

Anyway, on Sunday, I finished converting an old video tape to digital form. And, on Monday, I decided to put together a DVD of all the cat videos, so that we’d have something to watch Monday evening when everything was in reruns.

The clips were all captured with QuickTime Pro and saved as .mov files. I thought the easiest way to make a DVD would be with Apple’s iDVD software that comes installed on most (if not all?) new Macs as part of iLife.

Well, I was wrong.

The iDVD program will only let me use video from iMovie, photos from iPhoto or Photo Booth or audio from iTunes or GarageBand. Not QuickTime clips stored elsewhere (i.e., where I want them) on the hard drive. Which is stupid.

True, I could import all my QuickTime clips into iMovie and then save them and then use iDVD, but that seemed like a waste of time, due to being doubling of efforts and all. After all, the clips were already saved on the hard drive!

So, forget iDVD and iMovie.

Instead, I fired up Adobe Premiere Pro CS3. I didn’t go to it in the first place, as I figured it wouldn’t be as easy to make a DVD, especially seeing as how the last time I used Premiere on a regular basis, the DVD specification wasn’t even finalized yet!

Anyway, I pulled all my clips together, added a soundtrack and exported to Adobe Encore CS3. It did it’s thing. I stuck in a blank DVD. And, a short time later, I had a finished DVD!

I first tried it in the computer’s DVD drive, and it played. (It also asked me to set my Region, as apparently this was also the first DVD I’ve watched on this computer!) Next was the bigger question: Would it play in the actual DVD player (the one connected to the TV)?

Yes!

Success!

Some of the old video didn’t look too bad. Other bits weren’t quite as clear as what a newer camera might do. But, at least know I have some old memories preserved on DVD! (And I still have the original video tapes too.)

Many of the videos are 18 years old, so I’m lucky the video hasn’t deteriorated more than it has. From time to time, there will be some issues with the video that tracking and other options cannot fix. But, for the most part, the clips have been well-preserved, despite the video tapes not always being stored under optimal conditions! (But, they weren’t exposed to excessive heat or cold. And, they weren’t played frequently either; most haven’t been played in years, if ever! Most were probably only watched once after recording, just to make sure I got it!) And, a good portion of the videos were on long play tapes (recording six hours on a tape instead of two), which is a no-no. But, I didn’t know that then!

So, now I just have to find the rest of my recorded videos, which is somewhat difficult as the last 80-100 tapes aren’t marked. Before I got a full-time job (and even when I was still in school), I somehow found the time to watch a video tape and then write (down to the start and stop times) what was on the top. A job is about the same number of hours as school, and usually there’s no homework, yet there seems to be less time in the day… So, that’s how I have a bunch of unmarked tapes…

If you have any old VHS tapes you made in your camcorder, and you haven’t converted them to digital yet, now is the time! While tapes have the potential to last 100 years, many have an anticipated lifetime of about twenty years. My oldest tape, the one done in 1989 (or maybe it was 1988), had the most deterioration in it.

If you can’t convert them yet, make sure they are stored properly. High humidity (or lack of humidity) can cause problems, as will extreme temperatures. Sunlight, dust, cigarette or other smoke can also cause deterioration, as will exposure to strong magnetic fields. You should also rewind them and keep them stored upright. Don’t play them too often either!

And, once you save them to a digital format, don’t forget to occasionally save them to new media from time to time, lest you be stuck with a bunch of memories in a format future computers won’t be able to access!

Below, I’ve posted two of my early animations from September of 1990. They were done as stop-motion animation.

Basically, you shoot a frame, move your model a tiny bit, shoot the next frame, move the model, etc. Except, on my video camera, I don’t recall that I could film just one frame. I think it was basically a matter of how quickly you could press the button to start taping and press the button again to stop taping. Thus, the motion is even more choppy than it would otherwise have been just from my learning curve.

I’m not sure if I had a tripod then either. I am pretty sure I just set the camera on the dining room table, aimed at my little stage. You’ll notice that the camera occasionally moves because I must have moved it ever so slightly (or not so slightly sometimes, as you’ll see) when pressing the start/stop button.

Anyway, enjoy the animation, which is a bit lengthier than my computer-generated animations. And, be sure to stay tuned after the first fade-out. I’ve combined “Clayman” and “Clayman II” into a single video.

SPOILER WARNING: I think that Clayman II’s body (torso) may have been formed from what was left of Clayman. It looks like his body is brown, which is the color you get when you mix Clayman’s clay parts…

Oh, and I removed the sound. You don’t need to hear the clicking of the button, or my partial voice-overs.

Here is Little Too sleeping on her favorite $100 blanket.

Well, no, not really.

As you might have guessed, I created this image in Adobe® Photoshop. I’m using version CS3, but this technique will work in earlier versions too.

First, I took two photos. One of Little Too sleeping on the chair and another of a $100 bill.

I took the photo of Little Too and used it as the base. I then opened the $100 bill photo and deleted everything but the bill itself. In other words, I deleted the background. I then copied the image and pasted it as a layer over the Little Too photo.

Next, I copied Little Too’s photo and pasted it as a layer above the $100 bill.

So, now there are three layers:

1. Little Too
2. $100 bill
3. Little Too

On the top layer, I deleted the chair, which is the light beige fabric color you see in the bottom right corner. I selected the entire deleted area and expanded the selection by one pixel. I applied a Gaussian blur to eliminate the jagged edges where the chair was cut out. Finally, I applied a very slight drop shadow to darken the edges a bit, aligning the shadow to where the original shadows fell in the original image.

Next, I worked on the $100 bill layer. First, I rotated and moved the image into position. Then, I applied a texture filter, giving it a burlap texture to make it look more like a blanket and less like paper. Next, I applied a warp filter to distort it such that it roughly matched the curves of the chair, so that it looked somewhat naturally curved over the chair. I then applied a drop shadow (in the approximate opposite direction of the drop shadow used on Little Too’s layer). This last drop shadow was used to create the illusion of depth to the $100 bill image, so it looks like it has some thickness to it.

Finally, I also set the opacity of the $100 bill layer at 85%. This subdued the color of the $100 image (you could also adjust colors or desaturate, but this seemed to work best for this particular image) so that it matched the tone of the photo better.

Presto! Chihuahua puppy sleeping on a $100 bill blanket.

You could also use the “Match Color…” adjustment in Photoshop to better match the colors. While the layered photo was open, I also opened the original photo of Little Too. Working on the $100 bill layer, I chose “Match Color…” and used the original photo of Little Too as the source. That resulted in the below image, which matches even better than the top photo, I think.

And, there you go!