Very good news to report! Overall the movie looks just fine on TV, and a lot of the things I was worried about are not so bad at all. For example, there's really no need for much color correction, it should take a day at most. Also, it's not really very noticable that the first couple days were shot at 60 fps compared to the rest of the movie, which was shot at 30 fps.

There were two big surprises. First, Adobe Premiere was handling digital peaks much nicer than DVD players. Every time the audio hit full volume on playback, you could hear a really awful digital clipping noise. I'll have to use a limiter plugin to fix this.

Second, the DVD authoring program wasn't written to handle the way my chapters are laid out. I edited each chapter separately in Premiere, expecting that it would be trivial to turn them into DVD chapter points. Unfortunately, Adobe Encore only lets you assign chapters within a single movie clip. I was able to sorta work around this in the draft DVD, but eventually I'll have to combine all the chapters into one gigantic project - otherwise the chapter skip buttons on the DVD remote will not work correctly.

There are lots of little tweaks that need fine-tuning, like transitions here and there, etc. But overall, it's a lot more polished than I was expecting.

Of course in a few days I'll think it sucks.

It has taken all day to render the movie in the MPEG format used on DVD, but by this evening I hope have the first draft of the complete movie on DVD. No credits yet, but it even has a first attempt at the opening text. I'm using the Adobe defaults for DVD export, so I'm a little concerned that it won't look as good as I'd like. But there are higher-quality options for the final drafts.

The conversion process takes three times as long as the original material at these settings, so higher-quality rendering will probably take even longer than that.

The anticipation is killing me! More later when I see how it looks on a real TV...

The intro sequence is now fully blended into the first chapter, including the movie title and a couple of animated transitions. Now, all that remains for the beginning is to write the introductory titles, which I should be able to pound out pretty quickly.

It's a little scary to realize that I'm going to be watching it start-to-finish on a TV soon. Early on, I made a DVD with a clumsy draft of the first chapter, but I haven't seen anything on a real full-sized TV in a really long time. I hope it doesn't look like crap.

The intro sequence has gone faster than I expected. Today I finished most of the basic editing for it, but I still have the intro titles to work on, as well as the transition into the first chapter.

The biggest remaining hurdle is the intro sequence. Today I captured the last remaining clips for that, and I have a good idea of how it will all start now. This brings the "clip capture" progress meter to 100%, and the intro meter to 10%.