On Sunday morning before heading out to the Mariners game, I had to do a little video editing and dvd creation on my PC. During my wife's graduation ceremony on Saturday, I took my video camera along. In total I recorded 12 short scenes to the video camera's hard disc. Fine. So on Sunday morning I had to copy those files to my PC, using Sony's software that came with the video camera. My video camera is high-definition, using the AVCHD codec, and it can record audio in dolby digital 5.1 (surround sound). Fine. Or so you might think.

By the time I had finished copying the video files from my video camera to my PC, a process which involves not just copying but also analyzing the files, my 12 scenes had been saved to disc as 36 files. For each scene, I had a foo.m2ts file, which was the actual AVCHD video file. The filename was a user-friendly year-month-day-hour-minute-second.m2ts. Each of those 12 *.m2ts files came with an accompanying *.modd file and a *.moff file. Who knows what they are for, possibly the result of the "analysis" the Sony software had performed. Anyway, it's pretty annoying to have all these files cluttering up my filesystem instead of just having the actual video files.

But wait, there's more. I was doing this video editing to make a DVD containing the scenes I'd taken, to give to two friends of ours who had also graduated with my wife. Of course, I couldn't just give them the video "as-is". The AVCHD video codec can be used for blu-ray discs, which is logical since they are both Sony creations. I don't have a blu-ray disc burner in my PC, and I don't even know if they have a blu-ray player or not. So I had to convert the video to the DVD-Video standard codec, MPEG-2. Naturally, I made a copy rather than replacing the HD versions. The re-coding process took forever even on my dual-core machine, both cores pretty much maxed out. When it had finally finished, I was astonished to find my 12-scene, 36-file HD folder had a new 12-scene, 60-file SD folder alongside it. 60 files! The *.m2ts files had been replaced by *.mpg files, which I expected. But even the SD video files each had their *.modd and *.moff files, and now I also had a *.mpg.stk01 and *.mpg.stk02 file for each video file. Whatever. That's 5 files on disc for every time I pushed my thumb on the "record" button of my video camera!

Taking the high- and standard-definition files together, I was now up to 96 files. And I hadn't even started to make a DVD yet! This is just total BS!

And the frustrations with video editing on the PC just continued from there. By the time I was done - miraculously done just in time to make it to the Mariners game on time - I was pretty fed up with the PC experience and ready to go use a Mac. Next time I'll talk about my adventures with some video and dvd creation software that left a pretty bad taste in my mouth.

Word to the wise, never try doing home movie editing against the clock