[GreenKeys] MAC stuff -- guru advice needed -- off-topic, but tty-related

[gil smith]

Hi folks:

First, some rambling:

Yes, I too went back to mac this year, after a fifteen year hiatus;  got a 
nice macbook pro.  I'll need to keep some XP machines for some engineering 
and accounting apps, but I hope to never see Vista.  I was a big Mac fan 
back in the early days (still have an SE). Then I started a business, and 
all of my customers were using windows.  At that time, I reluctantly moved 
platforms, since "The Customer is Always Right"  -- you've seen the signs 
in offices everywhere.  Of course we all know the sign should really read 
"The Customer is Usually an A**hole, with Unrealistic Expectations."   Post 
one of those signs, and you'll smile every day.  I still kick myself for 
ever caving in to windows, and wasting untold hundreds of hours on stupid 
problems.  But I digress.

I love the mac -- all of my photo/music/print/web/media stuff is moving 
over.  I got the full Adobe Creative Suite since I do a lot of Photoshop, 
Illustrator, and Acrobat.

Pictures:  We have several Canon cameras -- Canon's photo import utility 
for the mac is just as clumsy as the win version, but it is the only 
utility I have found that lets me prefix the filename with a date (eg: 
20080514_ttypics_0001.jpg).  I love this, since an alpha sort puts 
everything in chronological order, AND, Walgreens prints the filename on 
the back of the pic, so it is much easier when we sit down once or twice a 
year to put pics in an album.

I don't use iPhoto, since I have used Photoshop since version 1.0 on the 
Mac II (the first color Mac), circa 1990-ish.  Had been stuck at version 4 
on windows, until now.  I also don't like the idea that iPhoto combines 
everything into one big proprietary file.  I want all my photos individual, 
chronologically-named, and in jpg format.  I'll take care of copies that 
get edited.

Music:  Can't beat iTunes and iPod for music serving.  I moved 30 GB of 
MP3s over from Winblows, with minimal hassle.  I'd like to delete iTunes' 
pre-defined genres, but that's no biggie, since I just add mine.  The only 
real problem I ran into was that a lot of the MP3s had the Artist and Title 
concatenated together in the Title field.  A bit of googling led me to an 
Applescript that fixed that.  It's pretty nice to find a quick solution to 
what would have been a tedious manual fix.  I'll have to learn Applescript 
someday.

I did my first slide show on the Mac for my cub scouts, and it was a lot of 
fun.  Photoshopped 240 pics, dragged them into iDVD, strung 20-minutes 
of  tunes together in GarageBand, dropped the mix into iDVD, added the 
rotating picture thing as the DVD title menu -- it was pretty easy.  Did 
run into a couple of problems:  I had it set to end perfectly on the last 
song (set show to length of audio, and iDVD calculates the slide-change 
interval for you).  Unfortunately, I swapped out a song in the mix, and 
when I updated the audio track it was 20 secs shorter;  then, near the end 
of the slide show, it wrapped around to the first song again.   Accck.  It 
was 2 in the morning so I didn't change it, since it took about an hour to 
render the first disc (but only a few minutes for copies).  Suppose I 
needed to reselect the "set to length of audio track" option.  The slide 
show also seemed to drop audio for a second or two here and there, and the 
video flickered up and down on a scan line periodically.  Any Mac gurus out 
there who have run into this before?  Maybe I need to select a 
higher-quality render mode.  Hmm.  Still, can't complain;  it turned out 
pretty nice.  Burned a disc for everybody in the den.

After all that preamble, I come to the tty-related question which is the 
focus of this email.  I am trying to re-create Ransom Slayton's slide show 
tour of the Teletype Museum.  I have a DVD of it -- the audio is good, but 
the pictures are very dark (copied from some old video tape).  Then I got 
high-quality scans of the original slides from the IEEE History Center (yes 
Jim, I still need to get these to you;  been trying to get this show done 
to send as well).

I want to take the audio from the DVD, combine it with the good pictures, 
and make a pristine version of the slide show.  Sounds simple enough, but 
here is what I have run into:

iDVD burns DVDs, and allows you to create slide shows, but the slides must 
change at a fixed time interval -- this does not help since the Slayton 
show has variable change intervals.

iMovie says it allows variable slide change intervals, and arbitrary 
transitions (Slayton used both instant and dissolves), but iMovie only 
outputs to Quicktime video -- can you render a high-quality Quicktime mov 
and then put it on DVD somehow?  It would be kinda nice to use iMovie then, 
since a lower-quality QT version could run off of the web.

Just getting the info off of the DVD is not trivial.  Yes, you could play 
it elsewhere, run the audio into the Mac line-in, and digitize it, but I 
found a utility that extracts the audio track from a DVD, so that is not 
necessary.  But I also wanted to see the original video with the audio, so 
I could plot the slide-change times.

No mac application would acknowledge existence of the original DVD .vob 
files (frickin' lawyers).  Then I found another utility (forget the name 
right now) that converts the original DVD .vob files into .mp4 files.  I 
was able open an mp4 file in GarageBand and see the video track and preview 
along with the audio track, determine the slide-change interval with great 
precision, and even place named markers at those locations.  A couple more 
problems though:  the utility that converted the vob to mp4 left truncated 
files, and did not convert the entire vob.  Also, the Slayton DVD has three 
vob files (to convert to three mp4 files), but GarageBand only allows one 
movie track -- since it is really designed for multi-track audio, and the 
movie track is an extra feature to allow syncing your audio mix to video, I 
can't really fault GarageBand for this.  So I would need to concatenate the 
vob or mp4 files first, and also fix the truncated mp4 problem, before 
importing the video/audio into GB -- at this point I could scroll through 
the whole thing, add markers at each slide-change, name the makers 
appropriately (eg:  Wheatstone perforator), and export a quicktime mov file 
(including markers, I presume).  I thought this GB-created mov file would 
be able to be opened in iMovie, but iMovie "only opens certain mov 
files."  Crap.  This is getting much more complicated that I expected.

I was focusing on GarageBand, since it seems to be the only app that lets 
me see the video as I listen to the audio, and place named markers where I 
need the slide changes (and I can likely solve the truncated and 
concatenated vob/mp4 file problems before starting).  But this does me no 
good if I can't get it into iMovie, where I can use the named markers, 
strip off the original video, and create the slide show from the picture files.

So I am a bit stuck at the moment, and in need of some advice.  I also have 
FinalCut -- this looks to be one super-duper video editing program, but 
looks like it is pro-oriented, and is a bit intimidating.  However, I will 
learn it if it will get the job done.

Doesn't seem like this should be as complicated.

Help!

thanks,

gil






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