I have finally realized that I have no business blogging, as I lack writing skill.  If that lacked eloquence and sounded a tad too blunt, it’s because I lack writing skill. I was going to start this post by talking about how some people simply operate on a level so far above us that you just can’t help but admire them, but then all my thoughts got jumbled and it faded away.

I have been trying to come to terms with a lot more than that recently, like working at a decent mature job that has hard long hours (note the lack of blog posts in two months), or having all these great ideas in my head that I lack the skill to make real.  I am losing my mental faculties and not dealing with it well.

This has somewhat stalled the MindCandy project, as we found out that the software we already paid for is incapable of producing BDCMF premastering output, which is required for a replication facility — no BDCMF, no glass masters.  So that means authoring a Blu-ray means we have to master from one of four available applications, three of which are too expensive, and a fourth that, while “cheap”, is buggy and unmaintained.  One of those options used to have a monthly license “rental” fee, but they recently stopped doing that and became outside our price range again.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, so I flexed some very old muscles and found an older version of something we’ll call “Canisters”.  “Canisters” is considered by many to be the gold standard for this sort of thing, so I guess I’m glad that I have the chance to look at it, except that Canisters is less of an application and more of a quirky scripting language, running in a quirky operating system, written in said quirky scripting language.  To compare and contrast:  In Adobe Encore, you define actions and playlists by using familiar concepts like, hold onto your hats, “actions” and “playlists”.  In Canisters, however, it is considered lucky if you can avoid building PGC’s by hand without the use of a hex calculator.

I am exaggerating, but only slightly.  What is NOT an exaggeration are the 360 pages of documentation I must consume to have any chance in hell of attempting to use Canisters — assuming the version I have access to is not broken beyond use.  There was a time, when I had my mental faculties (see above), when I was not only be capable of doing so, but would actually be relishing the thought of consuming all that information.   Those days are gone.  Somehow I have to come up with an alternative.