I had a short one day gig of taking an old show idea presentation and doing a few minor tweaks and additions to make it viable as a current show pitch. Nothing much involved, few title changes, a cut here, a tweak there, new b-roll here and there, and then output to DVD.

So I did all of that, and then I went to output for DVD…and was stopped in my tracks. How was I going to get this onto DVD? I don’t have a MOJO or Nitris box on the system, so I can’t go directly out to my DVD Recorder. Hmmm…OK. Well, I recall that the extra applications that came with Avid Media Composer included some DVD authoring software. So I grab the box, pull out the disk, put it into the computer, open it up…and am faced with a bunch of files and an installer.exe. Great…Windows only. Joy.

OK…this is Sunday afternoon. The client is due to come pick this up in an hour, and they need to present this on Monday morning. OK…what to do, what to do. I have the Matrox MXO, which works with Avid in PRESENTATION MODE (note to self: future blog post to explain that), but the image doesn’t look good….not in presentation mode. So that is out. I have DVD SP, but that is on my OS partition that has FCP installed (my main hard drive is partitioned into two…one side is FCP, the other for AVID). The FCP side can’t see the Avid compressed output, because I lack the codecs.

Heeeeyyy…Avid makes these codecs available on their site. Cool, I’ll go download those and I should be in business. So I find the Avid Codecs LE installer and install it…and get an error. INSTALL FAILED. Some post install process didn’t work. Damn. OK, I am chatting about my woes with a friend and he sends me the Avid codecs he has that came from that installer. Great, I install them and open the exported file…nothing. Black and the error that the codec is missing. Hmmm…

So I boot BACK to Avid, export as Avid DV (the first export was lossless Meridian 1:1) and then rebooted back to FCP. Again…nada. Crap.

I grab my Final Cut Studio 2 installer and install ONLY DVD Studio Pro on my AVID partition. Now I can import the Avid output and burn a DVD. Finally. It finished burning a few minutes after the client arrived. Looked good. He went home happy. WHEW.

Then I mentioned all of this on the FCP-L on Yahoo groups. Someone mentioned that I have the full PE (Professional Edition) of the installers on my Avid install DVD. Sure enough, I install that and BOOM, there we go. The FCP side saw all the footage.

Still, I thought that the LE Codec Installer (LE means LIMITED EDITION) would have installed the codecs I needed. I mean, at LEAST the Avid DV codec. And what irked me is that the installer gave the same error on my MacBook Pro. Very annoying.

SO there…that is how you burn a DVD from Avid. Follow those steps closely, followed by two bottles of beer (preferrably imported) and you will be good to go.