- Sep 11, 2005
- 17,571
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This is a long rant, but bear with me. There will be cliffs at the end for the lazy people. 
It should have been a simple, thirty minute piece of video editing. Instead, it turned out to be a two hour long nightmare involving raised voices and copious profanity.
For one of my classes I needed to throw together a short video as my part of a group project. I figured that I would just grab some videos from YouTube, toss them into iMovie with a few titles, send it on over to iDVD, and call it done. You would think that will Apple's infamous "it just works" motto, what I intended to do would be very simple and straightforward. Little did I know, it would be anything but.
I downloaded my videos using GetTube for OS X. That was about the only part of this whole thing that was easy and straightforward. You click on either the Safari or Firefox icon provided, it detects the YouTube page and embedded video, then downloads and encodes the video for you. My original plan involved using iDVD to put the movies on a DVD complete with a menu. I had even made a nice image to go on the title menu.
iDVD uses a little things called "drop areas" to place/hold content within the DVD menus and such. There was a nice pre-made template with the color scheme and layout I wanted, and it would have been perfect for my purposes. I sized the banner image so that it would look good at the resolution I was planning to use. I took my image and put it in the "drop area". Unfortunately, the image got stretched and resized to fill the size of the drop area, making it pixelated and pretty bad looking. No biggie, I figured, I could just resize it. Oh wait, I CAN'T. I can only move it around within the drop area. "Alright," I tell myself "there has GOT to be some method to resize the image... no way would a program lack a feature like that". Oh how wrong I was. From what I can tell, there is no way whatsoever to resize the image in the drop area to your likings. Apparently the drop area is a locked size, and any image going in there HAS to be that size. I was slightly pissed off to say the least, but I thought, "Alright I'll just create my own template or own layout". Guess what? You can't create your own templates or layouts. Yep, that's right, in order to create a DVD you MUST use one of Apple's predesigned templates.
So at this point I'm ready to jump out of the window, but decide against it because I would probably get maimed and not killed, which wouldn't fly. I say fuck it to iDVD and decide to keep it simple and just throw it together in iMovie. I had my fair share of problems with that program too, let me tell you. According to the program, If I want to add an image as a title, say, I can't, because it has to be a movie clip that moves. Yep, I've tried everything... but no matter what, my damn image moves. I looked long hard, but I saw no possible way to make it a stationary object.
The part that is most frustrating about all of this is the completely useless help topics. I looked through the Apple support site, in the programs' help files, and even saw some tutorial videos. None of them told me how to do the seemingly basic things I sought to do.
The university that I go to required us to get Macbook Pros through them. I didn't really see it as a problem because we got a very large discount and an external HDD, and the price wound up being not that much more than a similarly-equipped Windows book. It's a great machine, don't get me wrong, but there are quite a few things that bug me about it. What happened tonight was just icing on the cake.
Imagine not being able to delete files by pressing the delete key. Well, imagine no longer because Apple has made it a reality. I can't tell you how frustrating it is to not have something as simple as that. Also, in order to quite programs, I have to either go to Program > Quit, or press Cmd + Q. When you press the Xs on windows, it doesn't quit out of the program like on Windows. That also is frustrating. Also, the fact that I have to install a completely separate operating system or buy expensive software just so I can play some games is absurd. There are more things that bother me, but I can't think of them right now. I would switch to a Windows laptop without a second thought if I was given the chance and I didn't have to spend more money.
I can't believe some of this basic stuff that Apple has completely dropped the ball on. Forcing the use of templates? Not allowing a resize of images? Are you fucking kidding me? Ugh.
CLIFFS:
- Went to go do what should have been a 30 minute project
- Wound up taking 2+ hours thanks to Apple and it's shitty software
- Lack of easy-to-use help files is maddening and made it worse
- Apple leaves out simple features on it's products, and it's annoying
- You can't delete files by pressing the delete key? WTF is this shit?
It should have been a simple, thirty minute piece of video editing. Instead, it turned out to be a two hour long nightmare involving raised voices and copious profanity.
For one of my classes I needed to throw together a short video as my part of a group project. I figured that I would just grab some videos from YouTube, toss them into iMovie with a few titles, send it on over to iDVD, and call it done. You would think that will Apple's infamous "it just works" motto, what I intended to do would be very simple and straightforward. Little did I know, it would be anything but.
I downloaded my videos using GetTube for OS X. That was about the only part of this whole thing that was easy and straightforward. You click on either the Safari or Firefox icon provided, it detects the YouTube page and embedded video, then downloads and encodes the video for you. My original plan involved using iDVD to put the movies on a DVD complete with a menu. I had even made a nice image to go on the title menu.
iDVD uses a little things called "drop areas" to place/hold content within the DVD menus and such. There was a nice pre-made template with the color scheme and layout I wanted, and it would have been perfect for my purposes. I sized the banner image so that it would look good at the resolution I was planning to use. I took my image and put it in the "drop area". Unfortunately, the image got stretched and resized to fill the size of the drop area, making it pixelated and pretty bad looking. No biggie, I figured, I could just resize it. Oh wait, I CAN'T. I can only move it around within the drop area. "Alright," I tell myself "there has GOT to be some method to resize the image... no way would a program lack a feature like that". Oh how wrong I was. From what I can tell, there is no way whatsoever to resize the image in the drop area to your likings. Apparently the drop area is a locked size, and any image going in there HAS to be that size. I was slightly pissed off to say the least, but I thought, "Alright I'll just create my own template or own layout". Guess what? You can't create your own templates or layouts. Yep, that's right, in order to create a DVD you MUST use one of Apple's predesigned templates.
So at this point I'm ready to jump out of the window, but decide against it because I would probably get maimed and not killed, which wouldn't fly. I say fuck it to iDVD and decide to keep it simple and just throw it together in iMovie. I had my fair share of problems with that program too, let me tell you. According to the program, If I want to add an image as a title, say, I can't, because it has to be a movie clip that moves. Yep, I've tried everything... but no matter what, my damn image moves. I looked long hard, but I saw no possible way to make it a stationary object.
The part that is most frustrating about all of this is the completely useless help topics. I looked through the Apple support site, in the programs' help files, and even saw some tutorial videos. None of them told me how to do the seemingly basic things I sought to do.
The university that I go to required us to get Macbook Pros through them. I didn't really see it as a problem because we got a very large discount and an external HDD, and the price wound up being not that much more than a similarly-equipped Windows book. It's a great machine, don't get me wrong, but there are quite a few things that bug me about it. What happened tonight was just icing on the cake.
Imagine not being able to delete files by pressing the delete key. Well, imagine no longer because Apple has made it a reality. I can't tell you how frustrating it is to not have something as simple as that. Also, in order to quite programs, I have to either go to Program > Quit, or press Cmd + Q. When you press the Xs on windows, it doesn't quit out of the program like on Windows. That also is frustrating. Also, the fact that I have to install a completely separate operating system or buy expensive software just so I can play some games is absurd. There are more things that bother me, but I can't think of them right now. I would switch to a Windows laptop without a second thought if I was given the chance and I didn't have to spend more money.
I can't believe some of this basic stuff that Apple has completely dropped the ball on. Forcing the use of templates? Not allowing a resize of images? Are you fucking kidding me? Ugh.
CLIFFS:
- Went to go do what should have been a 30 minute project
- Wound up taking 2+ hours thanks to Apple and it's shitty software
- Lack of easy-to-use help files is maddening and made it worse
- Apple leaves out simple features on it's products, and it's annoying
- You can't delete files by pressing the delete key? WTF is this shit?
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