The flip side of running old tech is falling off the forum horizon, where the software and hardware you are working with lacks a critical mass of interested commenters and experts. I have been assembling and proofing a DVD of pics from out trip to Cuba to distribute in conjunction with some photo books and similar stuff for Xmas gifts. The book’s nearly done, looks great, and should be ordered on Monday. 

I thought the DVD was done more than a week ago, but I keep finding a persistent error in two slideshows, always on the same slides, even when the assets have been reencoded from scratch. I even rebuilt the whole project from scratch.

I’m using Apple’s long-discontinued iDVD. I started the process blissfully unaware that the software has begun to break in fundamental ways – for example, building slideshows from JPEGs, even ones exported directly to iDVD by Photos, produces a duotone bluish-purple pallette shift in iDVD which is obviously unacceptable. The solution is to export the pics and batch convert them to PDF, and the colorshift does not occur.

Now that was a solution surfaced via fora searching. But these slideshow hangs? Crickets.

Anyway, I think what I have to do is export the slideshows in question as Photos slideshow movie files, mpegs, hopefully with the sound embedded. I did that early on in the project as an experiment and found that the movie I had made lacked audio, so I had to lay that back in via iMovie. It was always time consuming to build these things, which is why people didn’t throw themselves into it with abandon when the tools were given to them. But this project is setting some records in this house.

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