(October 10)

As I try to burn the video I'm going to use for tonight's live show onto DVD, I realize that the Adobe Premiere no longer detects my DVD drive.

It was working fine till last month. But since then I renewed my hard-disk and reinstalled the OS, so I guess something has gone wrong because of that.

Well, the show is tonight and I have to do something about it before the evening. Not only do I want to prepare the DVD, but I also wanna rehearse and change the guitar strings. On top of that, packing all the equipments takes some time and I'd like to take a shower before I leave because it's an all-night event.

Having tried other fixes only to see no luck, I decide to export an AVI file from Premiere first, instead of burning onto DVD directly, and then write the file to the disc with another software. Now I need an application which converts the AVI to some video files such as VOB.

Web-searching let me find one from a US vendor costing $25, and another from a UK vendor costing 40 euros. First I try the cheeper one with the demo version, but it doesn't quite do the job. It doesn't produce all the VOB files needed.

I'm not sure if it fails because it's the demo or because it simply doesn't suit my case. On the other hand, the one from a UK vendor does it all right. The application is ConvertX, made by VSO.

It's an unexpected expense of 40 euros, but luckily euros and dollars are relatively cheeper against yen recently, so in that sense it's a burgain on a good timing. Burning a DVD with the aid of this application produces a better result than burning directly from Premiere, so I'd want it anyway.

I pay with Paypal, and 30 minutes later I recieve the license key via email. Right on time. If I couldn't have prepared the video, I'd have had to do the moonwalk I just learned lately, in order to keep the audience from noticing the lack of it.