On December 29th, 2011, at 4:15pm Eastern
Standard Time, in the city of Portland, Maine, I looked at a FedEx receipt that
I had just been handed, and couldn’t decide whether I wanted to jump up and
down in the Kinko’s store, or go immediately to bed.
The receipt represented an uncounted number of hours that I
had spent creating my very first short film, “The Epiphany of Zebediah Clump”.
The receipt also confirmed that my 8 ½ minute film was on its way to the
Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF), and would arrive before the final
deadline of January 6, 2012.
My feeling of tension about my film project had been rather off the charts in
the month of December, and the need to meet the SIFF deadline had impinged
substantially on my Christmas week holiday.
But the film was finally done, and on its way. The last
major task that I had needed to do was to take the exported file of my film and
burn it to a DVD that I could send to SIFF.
I also had to create a DVD cover, but that
was easy. What was not at all easy was the DVD
burning (authoring) of my movie. I suppose it should have been easy, but when
one is on a deadline, technical problems often start creeping out of the
corners with little billy clubs, offering snarky comments like, “So, you
thought you were finished, did you?”
The little techno rascals had challenged me from start to
finish with my film, primarily because of my own ignorance. From learning how
to edit in Lightworks, to transcoding raw footage for import, to creating good
exports, the technical aspects of dealing with digital film had been a huge
learning experience. Then, after all that was done, I had to actually burn my
lovely film to a DVD.
Since I had never actually used DVD
authoring software before, I started searching the web for software, and also
tried the software products that came with my Windows 7 laptop. All of them
shall remain nameless, since I don’t want criticize any products in this
review. In fact, some of them may have served someone very well.
In my case, I immediately ran into two deal-breaker
requirements. I wanted to see what the DVD
menus and the film itself would look like before
I burned the DVD (i.e. “preview mode”), and
I needed the software to correctly import my Quicktime .mov file. I had
exported it successfully from Lightworks, but some DVD
authoring programs choked on it, or wouldn’t import it at all. These were the
file specs:
Format: Quicktime
Sample rate: 48 kHz
Sample size: 16 bit
Stereo file from LR mix
Format: 1080p (sf) 29.97fsp
Compression: DVCPRO 100
Final .mov file size: 7.4 gigs
I began to panic; well, to slightly panic, because I
couldn’t find the software that would import the file correctly and offered a preview mode.
Finally, at the last moment, I found ConvertXtoDVD, at:
http://www.vso-software.fr/products/convert_x_to_dvd/
ConvertXtoDVD is created by VSO Software, located in the
southwest of France,
in the town of Toulouse. The author
of the software is the company’s founder, M. Jacques Vignoles.
I grabbed the trial version, and then the full version, and violà, it imported my .mov
file perfectly. If I had taken more than one year of High School French at the Waynflete
School in Portland,
I would attempt to say something more than “magnifique”. But there you have it.
Although it might not seem to be so, this is only a capsule
review of ConvertXtoDVD. The company is coming out with Version 5 very soon,
and I will do a longer review of that version, which will include a review of
its menu creation functions.
Since I was so very short of time in December, and because
SIFF didn’t require menus, I skipped the task of learning how to create them, and
instead created a “first play” DVD, which
means that it starts to play as soon as you pop it into the DVD
player.
I was very pleased that ConvertXtoDVD had that function, as
well as the ability to specify numerous options about film ratio, image filters
and many other things besides. Once I reached the decision to skip the menus, I
was able to burn a directory of DVD image
files in a jiffy, and from there, it was just one more step to burn the film to
a DVD. That proceeded apace and I soon had a
DVD of my wee film in my hot little hand.
After I did a bit of research about blank DVD
media and the quality of various brands, which is another story, I was able to
view my film on a variety of devices, including my laptop and widescreen TVs.
(I picked Sony DVDs by the way.)
It may seem like a small thing; the function of burning a
film to a DVD. I discovered that it was not
at all small, and with the specifics of my particular .mov file, it wasn’t at
all simple to find the right program.
ConvertXtoDVD proved to be the champ; at least for me. It
worked well, and worked quickly, and because of ConvertXtoDVD, I was able to
make my SIFF delivery deadline in time, for which I offer a sincere “merci” to
M. Vignoles and company.
Sometimes a receipt is more than just a receipt.
