Technology: Love or Hate?

So I used our new Mac to make a DVD photo album of our trip to Israel. It was relatively easy. Mac has done a great job making user-friendly programs for the technologically challenged (like me). I used iDVD. Everything is integrated, so you can just drag and drop your pictures background music, etc. and build your DVD. My iBook does not have a DVD burner, so I went down to the Seminary to use the burners in the Mac lab. I learned that you can use a firewire to hook your laptop up to the desktop. The desktop will read your laptop like an external hard drive. Very nice, since the file is so large it would be difficult and time consuming to transfer the file onto the computer with the burner. After getting everything in place, I dropped a DVD into the burner. Nothing happened. I tried a few more times, unsuccessfully. Finally, I took my stack of DVDs to the Media Lab help desk and asked the media guy why I was having problems. He explained that the DVDs I bought were incompatible with the burner. Did you know there are two different types of DVDs? I needed DVD-R, and I bought DVD+R. So, I took them back and got the correct format. The next day I returned to the Seminary for another try. This time it worked perfectly! The only problem was it took 15-20 minutes to burn 1 DVD! That’s a problem when you need 60 copies! Anyway I burned two copies of the rough raft and went home to continue tweaking the file. Once we got the file just right, I went back to DTS to do some serious burning. I learned from the Media Guy that the Seminary has a DVD copier. This is so cool! You put your master DVD in the top drive, and up to three blank DVDS in the three drives beneath. In less than four minutes, you can make three copies! So I burned a copy, and checked it in my laptop DVD drive. It worked perfectly, so I burned 59 more copies. When I got home, I excitedly put one in our DVD player attached to the TV. To my dismay, the edges were cut off of the screen, and you could not even read some of my button labels! Unbelievable! So I went back into the program (iDVD) and discovered a view option for “TV safe area.” I turned it on and sure enough, this border comes up and shows you what gets cut off if you view the DVD on a television! So I made all the necessary adjustments to the file, went back to SAMS (now the third trip) to buy some more DVDs. I went back to the Seminary to burn the corrected version. I ran out of time and had to go to work. The next day (Thurs), I went back to the Seminary to finish burning the 60 needed copies. I came home and labeled them with a cool little gadget called “CD Stomper.” This thing is pretty neat. For less than $30 you get software, a stack of labels, and a labeling base. Several hours later, the labeling was complete, and we’re ready to stuff our DVDs into the envelopes to send them off to friends and family! It was a fun project, but frustrating at times. I learned a lot, and I hope that my mistakes might save you from buying the wrong discs or from making 60 copies of the wrong thing! Anyway, I'm pretty happy with the finished product, and I am excited to share it with you all.