I was remiss in providing you with a fresh blog entry Friday. That's because I was busy pulling my hair out trying to figure out my latest digital video debacle. If you're interested in digital video you might find this post extremely interesting and enlightening, otherwise you might want to pass it by.

Previously I was crowing because I had finally gotten around the hardware hurdle. Thanks to the Canopus ADVC 110 I finally had something that could reliably capture the noisy signals from my old VHS tapes. Armed with three different video editing programs on my computer I figured I was now home free.

Not so! It just meant the software chapter of my woes had begun.

Previously I was capturing in MPEG2, figuring since that was the DVD standard it must have been the highest quality. After a little reading I found out this was not so; AVI, or DV-AVI, is the highest quality. So now that I was getting ready to convert some old 8mm films from the `60's through the `80's that had been transfered to VHS I figured I'd better go for the best to get the most out of these crusty old pictures.

I went to my then-favorite editor, ArcSoft Showbiz 2. It turned out that while Showbiz works great with MPEGs, it was awful with AVI. It would induce all sorts of low-fi grain and wrong-bitrate distortion to the audio, like an AM radio, and exporting to MPEG didn't help. So I turned to Windows Movie Maker.

Movie Maker was weird because it would play an MPEG from the timeline once, then never play that MPEG again. With the high-quality AVI's it was fine, though. Well, it would look and sound low-fi as part of the actual timeline, but that was a sort of "rough draft" mode; once exported to AVI or MPEG it was quality again. However WMM doesn't have the ability to make menus and burn DVD's so that left the Roxio Easy Basic 9, but from experience with the full-version Roxio 6 I had their editing interface is clumsy and the rendering, at least in 2003, blew.

The Firewire card I had bought came with a free program called Ulead Video Studio SE 9. If the card was only $40, how good could the free software be? I tried it out, and lo and behold, I loved it! It handled MPEG and AVI with equal ease and had plenty of options without getting complicated. I put together a 13 minute video of James Brown on David Letterman from 1982 that a friend had wanted a copy of, added some titles and transitions, and it looked freakin' smokin', like a pair of hot pants, James might've said.

With that done I was ready to tackle the grainy old 8mm film-to-VHS-to-DVD project. Thanks to the guys at an amazing forum I found called Video Help.com I found a free capture program called WinDV 1.2.3. I hadn't been looking for a new capture program but I tried this one and it's the best I've come across. Previously I said the Canopus would lose the signal if the time code was broken on your VHS but this WinDVD thing tracked two hours of rough VHS without a hitch!

So I had the VHS saved in high-quality AVI's on my hard drive (AVI is so high-quality it has to be broken down into individual 2 GB files so your PC can even deal with it. The raw video from this two-hour VHS came to 29 GB!). I edited in opening titles and closing credits...and found for some reason this two hours of video was 7 GB even after compressed to MPEG. This was gonna be a two-discer. The only thing I could figure was that when the computer had to track every grain of dust and stray hair on the 8mm film, as well as the color noise from the VHS, it turned into a monster file. I re-edited for a two-disc version.

Now that that was done I hit the "Burn Disc" button in Ulead. Forty-eight seconds passed and I got a "an unexpected error has occurred" message, and Video Studio closed up! I tried multiple times, restarting, uninstalling and installing, and it did this every time. I tried the 13 minute James Brown video again and it worked fine, but something about this hour video was blowing it's mind.

I Googled into the wee hours and saw where people had this identical problem in every version from 6 to 12, even after spending $100 for the full version. No one had a solution except to buy something else.

My friend Scroll recommended Sony Vegas, but the interface on the trial version of that looked like the Space Shuttle. I had no choice but to get this Ulead thing to work.

On closer inspection, Microsoft said the problem was "AppName: vstudio.exe AppVer:9.0.0.0 ModName: uvmpeg2.dll ModVer: 8.0.0.0 Offset: 00014744."

The "uvmpeg2.dll" in particular caught my eye. I gambled on the idea of finding that dll and deleting it, though trying such things has fried my system before. So I searched and found two instances of that dll running. I moved them both to the Recycle bin, but didn't delete them, in case I needed to restore them later.

Then I went to the Control Panel and hit the Uninstall button, but rather than uninstalling I clicked the Repair option. Ulead did a little grinding, then asked me to put the original disc in. I did, and the next time I tried it...it worked! Previously within 48 seconds of hitting Create Disc it would give the "unexpected error" pop-up, but this time it worked. I also just did another disc with both the Burn DVD and Create ISO options checked, and it did both without a problem. I had tried uninstalling and reinstalling before, but that didn't change a thing, only this method did. I just hope I haven't been lucky, but I think I've really fixed it. I think I've really got this under control (famous last words)!

So prepare to be tortured with videos of my old band and who knows what else. Between this blog, Cakewalk Home Studio 2 and Ulead Video Studio, I shall never budge from this chair again.