iDVD - misery and despair

If it's not one problem it's another. Having been trying to deliver my first product to my first customer for over a week now, I have encountered and overcome many problems and over-run my Christmas deadline.
Having barely slept or eaten for a week, chain smoked instead of quitting and stayed mostly indoors - I am feeling pretty run down, so run down that on my last burn attempt - the same day I threw away 20 useless yet beautifully printed DL DVD's (8 times price of SL here) - I managed to make a couple of little errors whilst creating my iDVD menu - stuff like forgetting to add music on the second scene selection page, nothing major but still fustrating after 14/16 hours burn time.
As usual, tonight I half slept - excitedly waiting for that disc to pop out so I could finally watch it all the way through as I intended it to be. I saw no disc, upped the brightness and saw this.



As you will see from the pic below, I am good to my Mac - I bought that fan especially to keep it cool for major tasks.
I need to finish this job to get paid. It is nearly 4am Bangkok time and I am in a smelly all night internet cafe full of loud teenagers playing video games and being bitten by mosquitoes.



This is not how I pictured my positive new year having my own videography business.
I guess I could just say - my MBP has started crashing toward the end of disc burning in iDVD, are there steps I can take to avoid this? But despair and fatigue are destroying my hope of ever burning this movie.
Yes it's a big project - (I had it on professional quality )but it's done it before, why won't it let me reach the finish line?

*Update - it is now 9PM and iDVD crashes before it even loads the Revolotion menu page. I have reinstalled from original disk, restarted and after 5 attempts I got it but with only the default menu music and a pitch black rectangle.

I want to throw my MBP out of the window and myself with it. I have been trying to burn this film for a week.

Don't have iDVD in front of me right now. But I think under the File menu is an option to create a disk image (archive?). I do that first, mount the resulting image, and retest with DVD Player. Then I burn that to a DVD. I personally use Toast, but I think Disk Utility will do that too. I create the disk image after the assets have completed their conversion in iDVD which you can tell via the Project menu.

Given the current situation, I'd FIRST backup the system or at least your project, run the permissions fix. If that doesn't fix the problem, boot off the install disk, run the Repair Disk option. Those options are run from Disk Utility app. After this, create an empty iDVD project, save it and quit. Then open the real project.

Thankyou for your time but complicated alternatives are unnessesary - I just want iDVD to do it's job - I just want my Mac to do its job.

If the movie was too big it would tell me - I have taken it back to the iStudio where iDVD has been reinstalled yet again and updated.

It crashed again at 3am this morning - spent yet again another 30 minutes creating menu & scene selection - tried again and will know in another 14 hours.

Thanks to the unreliability of my Mac I now weigh 67 kilos, am an insomniac and a chain smoker.

Did you even try what XStep told you in his second paragraph? I feel he gave you excellent help and suggestions.

^ Like I said I appreciate his advice but I only understand half of what he's talking about because I am not a computer person - never have been.

I'll write down his post and go to the Apple store yet again.

cameronryan said:

^ Like I said I appreciate his advice but I only understand half of what he's talking about because I am not a computer person - never have been.

I'll write down his post and go to the Apple store yet again.

Click to expand...

I'm not meaning to sound harsh, but hard truth is that if you want to become even a semi-professional videographer (like it seems you do), then you will have to become a "computer person". The computer is one of the most important aspects of post-production. You will need to not only learn the software and how to run it, but you need to know how to troubleshoot issues your computer may encounter. If you don't, then your jobs are only going to get harder and more difficult in the future. Also, xstep's suggestions were hardly a complicated alternative. They are pretty much basic troubleshooting/maintenance procedures for the Mac OS that a Mac user of any experience level should be familiar with.

I understand as well that funds may be limited for you at the moment, but you should really look into saving up and getting some higher-grade software for your projects. You seem to be dedicated and determined to get a video business off the ground, but you are going to run into more snags than solutions if you continue to use iLife software for your client's jobs.

^ I know you are right, weather I like to admit it or not I know you are right.

There's a company here in Bangkok which trains people to use advanced applications like FCP, DVD Studio Pro, Livetype etc... Once this cursed project is complete and I have cash then I will invest in this training and put i-Life behind me.

I'm in an internet cafe so I'll write down the advive and try it at home - BUT - I don't think I can wait another 14 hr burn only to be dissapointed again - I'll probably throw it out the window and myself after it.

Can a videography business even be run on a laptop? Maybe I should win the lottery and gert an iMac.

I'd highly recommend towers, not laptops and iMacs, for a videography business. Basically what would be best is the Mac Pro along with Final Cut Studio. Cheap? Of course not. Worth it? Oh god yes. Just remember that even if you get this high end hardware and the high end apps to go with it, it is no substitute for knowledge. You will have to spend time learning how the apps work before you can go out advertising for business.

cameronryan said:

Thankyou for your time but complicated alternatives are unnessesary - I just want iDVD to do it's job - I just want my Mac to do its job.

Click to expand...

If you pay attention to nothing else I said, DO what I said in my first paragraph above. If it works out, you will save repeating that 14 hour step. You then can concentrate on the burning process separately. The option I was talking about (now that I'm at my Mac) is "Save as Disc Image..." under the file menu.

I'm also wondering why it is taking 14 hours. That seems more than excessive. Are you short on memory or disk space or running other applications like Safari. No, I don't want an answer.

Lastly, if you are going to ask for help, then give the responses more consideration of action. If you are not open to trying new ideas, you are wasting our time. If you don't understand what someone is saying or asking, figure out what you can and respond back with the parts you do understand and do not understand. You have opened you self up to not being responded to in the future by the people who can help you.