Video/Audio: Great Tools for Your Business
Video can be fun and also frustrating! I had a big job last week — I had to take a physical course and make it digital. Seems easy enough, right?
It's NOT. Not at all.
3-90 Minute videos and 126 audio files to convert, create players for, and to make download pages for. A lot of work, but I figured it would just be mind numbingly boring, yet not a huge deal.
Problem was that the files were .vob files and Camtasia can't handle them. Sony Vegas can, but the files that it renders from that format come out bigger than T-Rex. Argh. They took hours to render and even longer to upload, though I didn't even try.
So… what to do?
As it turns out, I found a much easier solution…
I got a piece of software called Leawo DVD to Video Converter, and I WISH they had an affiliate program because this little bit of software saved my life, and it was only $40.90! You feed the DVD into the software, and it spits out an .mp4 as pretty as you please. I mean, the file is perfect! I was able to cut a 90-minute video down into 15-minute chunks in Camtasia and then re-render it as .mp4. With Camtasia, the files were under 50M each.
Then, I had 20 audio CDs to convert and upload. I figured out that I needed a converter for that, too, pretty quickly. (Lessons learned by me aren't soon forgotten. LOL), so I got a .cda to .mp3 converter from HOO Technologies that is amazing and only $19.95 for the pro version. It converts a complete CD in under 5 minutes. Sweet! I got 126 audio files converted in just a couple of hours, running from one computer to another. LOL Actually, I had one computer converting, one rendering and one uploading. I got lots of exercise last week. Ha!
But that's just the deal. Whatever it takes, figure it out and get 'er done, eh?
Seriously, if you ever find yourself in a situation where you need to convert DVDs and CDs, you should know about these. They work great, and aren't very expensive. Well worth the small prices. Believe it!
All the audio/video geeks are laughing at me, no doubt, but hey… you may not know what to do in a case like that, either. So… I wanted you to have the answer.
No charge. 
