The World Needs More Ninjas

Goal: Take an hour of camcorder footage, digitize it, splice out the best clips, and burn it to a DVD.

Why does this process have to be so freakin’ hard? This details my adventure. First, there’s the matter of getting the film from my friend’s camcorder, which only has composite outputs, to a digital format. I’m sure they make adapters for this, but they’re not something I see very often. So, I go to another friend who has a standalone DVD-recorder. We try a Sony DVD-R that I brought over and it doesn’t work. And, by “doesn’t work”, I mean locks up the recorder to where he has to restart it. So, he uses one of the el cheapo generic Office Depot DVD-Rs that works fine.

What the heck is up with optical media? I mean consumer CD burners have been mainstream for over a decade and the process is still hard as all get out when compared to copying files to a hard drive or flash drive. Whereas most things in technology show exponential improvement, making the use of optical media easier for the consumer is still basically where it was in 1996.

So, I get the DVD and take it home to place on my DVD player. It plays, except you can’t skip chapters or fast forward or else the player locks up (seeing a pattern here?). Honestly, why on earth are their so many compatibility issues? We can put man on the moon but making a recorder that creates media that plays on a player is beyond current technology?

Next, there’s the matter of transferring the DVD footage to my computer. To do this, I open up one of the few programs that I paid for: Adobe Premiere Elements. We bought it because it’s supposed to be the best program available in the video editing department. Let’s just say I’d hate to see the worst. First, the program takes over a minute to load. I attribute this to Adobe Bloat. Adobe Reader loads every plug-in under the sun just to read the simplest of documents. Photoshop Elements takes like ten times longer than GIMP to load and has half the capabilities. If you want to get fired at Adobe, just create a program that loads in under ten seconds and loads less than fifty plug-ins.

Finally, Premiere opens and gives me one of those crappy “What do you want to do today?” screens that you can’t bypass. Maybe I just want to check out the features without creating a new slew of folders. Unfortunately, I don’t get this option.

But everything up until now is a walk in the park compared to the user interface that pops up to new users. Note to designers: bringing up six internal windows the first time a user opens your program is not good. No freakin’ clue where I was supposed to start doing stuff. If you have to Google and read the 100-page instruction manual just to figure out the first step, something’s wrong. If I have to read instructions just to get started, it’s not a well-designed program.

So, I figure out that I need to add media by importing the DVD video. This consists of three *.VOB files on the disc, which makes no sense to me considering it’s one video. Ten minutes later, the program finally finishes “importing” the video.

OK, now I have to add the video clips to the timeline. Each clip is represented by a row with a thumbnail followed by info, such as the frame rate. Every other program I’ve ever used would let you highlight the entire row to drag it to the timeline. Not this one. Through trial and error, you have to figure out that even though the entire row is highlighted, you have to drag the thumbnail to get the clip to the timeline.

Ah, finally I have the video to the point I can edit it. The splicing part was actually pretty easy and intuitive. But, now we hit another little performance road block. See, when you go to play the video in the timeline to see what’s happening, it goes at like one frame per second for some reason. So, it’s basically useless except for the fact that the audio is smooth.

After hours of wrestling with Premiere’s wonderful clip player, I finally have the finished product ready to export. First, I wanted a digital video. What in the heck is up with all these stinkin’ formats? With audio, I can just choose MP3 and know it’s compatible with virtually every device in existence, well compressed, and 99% of the population won’t care about that it’s lossy. With video, I have to choose Quicktime, Windows Media, or MPEG. Seems MPEG is the most compatable, so I go with that one. It’s a sad state for video formats when the de facto standard for platform independent video is quickly becoming….drum roll, please…Flash! I’m sure that Macromedia never in their wildest ideas thought the most popular use for the technology would someday be streaming video.

Now, I find out that encoding this 24-minute clip to MPEG takes like two hours and produces a 350 MB file. And, of course, the process is so resource intensive that you basically can’t do anything else on the computer concurrently. Next, comes the DVD burning part. Oh joy. For one thing, I wanted to copy the original video (before splicing), which was still on DVD. I thought, I’ll just use the “Create DVD files on hard drive” option and then burn those to a DVD-R. The encoding process to get the files from the DVD to the hard drive takes like three hours…which makes no sense to me since there shouldn’t be much coding involved since it’s the same file format. And, here’s the real beaut, to get burn these files back to a DVD in such a way that they play in a DVD player, you have to re-encode those same file which takes another three hours. I tried just burning the files directly to a DVD, but this just gave me coasters that couldn’t be played. OK, so six hours later I finally have a playable DVD.

Another nice quirk about the whole process is when you leave the encoding process unattended and the screen saver comes on, Premiere just silently crashes. No error message or anything. You just come back three hours later to see that Premiere is no longer running and the DVD wasn’t burnt.

Surely, with the massive growth in YouTube and Google Video, there has to be a better tool on the way. Something that gives you more options than Windows Movie Maker (e.g., DVD burning, more fonts, DVD menus) without the complexity, terrible interface, and hideous performance of Adobe Premiere.