Daily Archives: December 21, 2007

Acrobat Side-by-side Comparison Got Sidestepped

Posted on December 21, 2007 | Leave a comment

One of the most useful features in Adobe Acrobat 5.0 that I used first as a student and then later even more at work was its ability to compare two documents side-by-side and mark all the differences. It is the only program I know to date that enables one to do this. I used it frequently to compare all sorts of files, usually either MS-Word documents or MS-Excel sheets. While this does involve the extra step of creating PDFs, it works beautifully in most cases. Continue reading →

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Review, Technology

Tagged , ,

Compressing Double Layer DVDs

Posted on December 21, 2007 | Leave a comment

The wedding movie mentioned in the previous post is actually over three hours long and does not fit onto a single layer DVD. While I did buy a package of double layer (DL) DVDs I was rather shocked about their price. At nearly $2.2 they are more than 5 times as expensive as single layer DVDs. In this article, I found a useful hint of how to use Toast to compress double layer DVDs. Here’s how to do it: Continue reading →

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Mac OS X Platform, Tips & Tricks, Videography, Workflow

Tagged ,

Widescreen Menus in iDVD

Posted on December 21, 2007 | Leave a comment

I just finished a nice widescreen movie from my sister’s wedding and I figured, if the movie is widescreen I might as well make the menu widescreen as well. I only have a standard 4:3 TV, but am used to watch widescreen movies with a letter-box, i.e., black bars on top and bottom. Naturally I expected the menu to also be letter-boxed, alas, that’s not the case. Continue reading →

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Mac OS X Platform, Videography

Tagged ,

“TV Safe Area” Nuisance in iDVD

Posted on December 21, 2007 | Leave a comment

When creating a DVD menu in iDVD, there is an option from the Tools menu called “Show TV Safe Area”. What this means is that pretty much anything outside that box won’t show up on your TV. It also won’t show up on you computer when testing the DVD from a disk image. Continue reading →

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Mac OS X Platform, Videography

Tagged ,