Journal damn_registrars's Journal: iDVD - WTF ??? 7
Wow, congratulations Apple, you have taken what is allegedly a "simple" function and made it mind-blowingly, aggravatingly, complicated. My wife and I bought a HD "Flip" mini camcorder that records in 720p. We have ~1 gb of video from it that we wanted to burn to a DVD for a relative to watch. My wife has a Dual G5 PowerMac workstation with 3 GB RAM running the last version of OS X that was released for the G5.
This should be an easy task, right? That was the whole idea of iDVD / iTunes / iCal / iJerkOffMadly, right - to make a common task very easy and intuitive? Well, iDVD does neither. The only thing that iDVD really excels at is making our Dual G5 seem like a Vic20 with a bad cassette drive. Well, that and making me want to jump out the office window to get away from the madness.
At first I thought that maybe iDVD was running to shit-tastically slow because I was trying to copy the files straight from the camcorder to the software. So then I killed iDVD and copied the files I wanted to the local HD and started over. I got the same horrendous response rate that way, so that didn't seem to be the problem. And what the hell are these "drop zones" that are shown at the beginning, and then selected randomly in front of me? Why can't I get back to selecting them after filling one up? And why do I only get to add 12 files to a single page? I own plenty of DVDs with more than 12 selectable chapters per screen but for some reason Apple in their infinite wisdom has decided those don't matter and 12 is all I get.
But the biggest question is likely this. What the hell is iDVD doing when I get the spinning beach ball of death? I get the damned beach ball all the time and I can't find a correlation between the ball and any activity of mine. Or any activity of anything at all, really. The damned beach ball stops spinning at no particular point, and then I am at a different point in iDVD than I was before, but I have no idea why. Nor do I know how to get back to where I was before; which I suppose doesn't matter since I wasn't previously anywhere useful anyways.
All that said, I will admit that apparently I am the only human being known to ever walk the earth in the history of our species who did not find the original iPod intuitive. I despised the iPod wheel and all variants of it, never finding them that useful. Perhaps that means that the key to using iDVD is to think like an iPod (whatever the hell that means...)
OK, I'm getting off my soapbox now. If you read this far I thank you for your time.
This should be an easy task, right? That was the whole idea of iDVD / iTunes / iCal / iJerkOffMadly, right - to make a common task very easy and intuitive? Well, iDVD does neither. The only thing that iDVD really excels at is making our Dual G5 seem like a Vic20 with a bad cassette drive. Well, that and making me want to jump out the office window to get away from the madness.
At first I thought that maybe iDVD was running to shit-tastically slow because I was trying to copy the files straight from the camcorder to the software. So then I killed iDVD and copied the files I wanted to the local HD and started over. I got the same horrendous response rate that way, so that didn't seem to be the problem. And what the hell are these "drop zones" that are shown at the beginning, and then selected randomly in front of me? Why can't I get back to selecting them after filling one up? And why do I only get to add 12 files to a single page? I own plenty of DVDs with more than 12 selectable chapters per screen but for some reason Apple in their infinite wisdom has decided those don't matter and 12 is all I get.
But the biggest question is likely this. What the hell is iDVD doing when I get the spinning beach ball of death? I get the damned beach ball all the time and I can't find a correlation between the ball and any activity of mine. Or any activity of anything at all, really. The damned beach ball stops spinning at no particular point, and then I am at a different point in iDVD than I was before, but I have no idea why. Nor do I know how to get back to where I was before; which I suppose doesn't matter since I wasn't previously anywhere useful anyways.
All that said, I will admit that apparently I am the only human being known to ever walk the earth in the history of our species who did not find the original iPod intuitive. I despised the iPod wheel and all variants of it, never finding them that useful. Perhaps that means that the key to using iDVD is to think like an iPod (whatever the hell that means...)
OK, I'm getting off my soapbox now. If you read this far I thank you for your time.
BSOD be damned (Score:2)
What the hell is iDVD doing when I get the spinning beach ball of death?
You sir win quote of the month award!
Dumbass (Score:1)
Is there a dumber slashdotter than damn_registrars? If so, I hope to never meet him/her/it/blorxz.
Re: (Score:2)
No, it's not the DVD that has the limitation, it's the player.
You can burn 720p (and even 1080p) onto a DVD, but you won't get that quality in playback without using an HD or BluRay player. So, since what your G5 is doing with the video is all "in the box" the slow performance is probably due to the system and not the fact that you're working in 720p.
I've found that I can put 20+ minutes of 720p onto a DVD with my M
Re: (Score:1)
Be quiet. You're only going to confuse him.
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OSX is bloated (Score:2)
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