So, I made a DVD. (You can find it for sale here)
I released a video to accompany this blog post, which is something of a sequel to the last blog post. Yeah, that’s something I do now: sequels to blog posts.
So the last blog post was because I had finally finished the life goal of making a feature length film. That post was made in Nov 2023, and it is now March 2025. Somehow, I’m still here talking about the same darn film. Have I not made any progress?!
Well, that’s partially what this post is about. I decided to make a DVD/Blu-ray of my film Sorry, We’re Dead, even though it’s already available on some streaming platforms.
Making a feature length film is a freaking long process, but the process of actually being completely “done” with the film, that one is the real painful one. Waiting on festivals and screenings stretches out for more than a year already, and then trying to get the film distributed in some form or another is another process, and the whole time you’re attempting to do some lame version of “marketing” and getting the word out about the film.
The entire time though, there was this little voice in the back of my head saying “What if you made a proper DVD of your film?” It’s a thought that I was always pushing back, but it would never go away, and it just grew louder over time. I kept thinking about what kinds of extras I could try to include, and if I had some deleted scenes or bloopers that I could add. What made me decide to go for it was that I began to see it as this nice “bow on top” to help me feel like the project is finished, since the process of screening the film and “getting it out there” was tailing off asymptotically, but never quite reaching the end.
For budget reasons, I decided to do as much of the DVD/Blu-ray work as I could myself. I decided to do all of the preparation and creation of bonus content, prep the film files for DVD/Blu-ray, and do as much of the art work and menu design and DVD/Blu-ray authoring as possible.
And man, it was all a lot more work than I was expecting, and I already DID expect it to be a lot of work when I set out to do it.
First, I tested some of the tools and software I had to make sure I could make this even work. I opened my old Adobe Encore CS6 software (Adobe’s last DVD/Blu-ray authoring software release) on my old 2013 Macbook (with the last MacOS that could run CS6) and made a quick test project, and that all still seemed to work. I was able to export some files and get them into Encore, then burned onto a physical Blu-ray and DVD, and they played back on my Blu-ray player, so it all seemed like it would work.
Once I determined that I had the tools necessary, I sat down to decide what bonus content I would include, knowing that each extra piece of content was going to increase the amount of time to get everything done. I already had the full film, an SRT file of closed captions, two trailers, and a cut of the bloopers that I had shown at a cast and crew screening. I also had the original 3 short films we had made before the feature film, and those seemed like a great thing to include.
I knew that some deleted scenes existed, but it would require work track them down and edit them together into a state they could be shown, and I liked the idea of having some commentary tracks, but those would definitely need to be recorded. Maybe I could do commentary tracks for the short films too? Maybe a cast commentary track for the film? Maybe a crew commentary track? I always loved listening to the commentary tracks for films I enjoyed, and learning about the process of making the film and how the director felt about everything. And I think it was maybe the Scott Pilgrim Blu-ray that had included not one, but three commentary tracks for the film! And I believe they even had commentary for the deleted scenes, which was the first time I had seen that, and I thought that was a genius idea because don’t you want to know more about why these scenes were deleted? And meanwhile, should there be other bonus features like behind-the-scenes photos or video, or some kind of “making of” video, or interviews with the cast or crew, or some kind of work-in-progress things that could be shown? Or like, maybe we should include some film festival Q&As or some of the radio interviews we did? And also, there was a Stereo and a 5.1 mix of the film, wouldn’t it be cool if you could switch between them? And there was an Italian film festival that had subtitles made for the film, wasn’t there? Wouldn’t it be cool if I included those Italian subtitles? Are there any other languages I should include too?
So many ideas, and each one is its own rabbit hole to get sucked into.
I decided that I was going to try and do some of these bonus content features, but needed the line somewhere. And I decided that anything that was going to require TOO much editing or too much “new” work was likely going to the chopping block. So I narrowed the list of features on the DVD/Blu-ray to these:
-The Full Feature film, with stereo and 5.1 audio
-The Short Films
-The Bloopers
-Deleted Scenes
-Director, Cast, and Crew commentary tracks for the Feature
-Director commentary tracks for the short films and deleted scenes
-English Subtitles for the Feature Film and Short Films, Italian subtitles for the Feature
-The two trailers for the film
-Scene Selection Menu (not really a special feature but was going to require some work)
-Some kind of an overall menu (again, same as above. Not “special”, but will require work)
-Case and disc art (same as above)
Even that list ended up getting whittled down slightly further by the time I reached the finish line. Let me go into some detail about each of these, because each one took some extra work to actually complete.
Let’s just start at the top of the list. The full feature film, with stereo and 5.1 audio. While exporting the film for DVD/Blu-ray, I already discovered the first problem. Normally, Adobe Encore either re-encodes any video you import for DVD/Blu-ray, or you can export a specific type of DVD/Blu-ray file yourself, and if Encore recognizes the file, it can skip the re-encoding. I don’t trust Encore to encode the files, and want to make sure the files are exported just right with exact settings I’ve chosen, so I do this in Premiere 2024. But way later, when I’m compiling all of the elements I’ve made for the DVD/Blu-ray, it turns out that Encore does not like the DVD/Blu-ray files that Premiere 2024 makes, and wants to re-encode them. And there is no way to override this. Either it gets files that it approves, or it re-encodes. I scramble through many older versions of Premiere and keep re-exporting the film and importing it into Encore to see if it ever “approves” of the files, and I forget exactly which one, but I believe Premiere 15.0 finally produces some DVD/Blu-ray files that Encore approves of. Great. I only have Premiere 15.0 installed on an older Windows machine, and they don’t let you download a version that old from Creative Cloud anymore, so I’ll have to annoyingly get all of my film files onto the windows machine to export all the DVD/Blu-ray files out there, then bring them back onto the 2013 Macbook. Great. I lose easily a full day of time to trying to resolve this.
Then, part 2 of the problem: It turns out that Premiere doesn’t actually have the ability to export 5.1 surround audio files in the proper DVD/Blu-ray format. Encore can accept properly formatted 5.1 surround files, but Premiere can’t export them! Perfect. I spend a day of my time trying to find a workaround, and ultimately use Audacity with some FFmpeg plugin to take my 5.1 audio and export it as the necessary .ac3 file. Now, added bonus, I have no way to actually check that this 5.1 audio track, when put on a Blu-ray/DVD, actually plays back properly on a 5.1 sound system, because I don’t have a 5.1 sound system. I spend a lot of extra time reaching out to various post studios and audio friends to see if anyone can get me access to a 5.1 sound system I can test my Blu-ray on. Ultimately, I find that Roast N Post in Oakland has what I need and is willing to let me use their gear to test the Blu-ray, so thank you Roast N Post! I burn a Blu-ray, take it to their studio, and the 5.1 sound works! Great.
Later in the process, like right as I’m finishing everything up with the DVD/Blu-ray, I discover that the DVD is just crammed absolutely full. Standard DVDs only have 4.7gb of space, and I’ve taken all of that up and then some with the film, special features, and menus. There are dual layer DVDs which can hold more, but the DVD printer I’ve chosen (DiscMakers) doesn’t support dual layer discs, or at least not in combination with some of my other requests. I look around for other options, but everything is ultimately more expensive and difficult if I go the dual layer route, so I spent easily two days trying different combinations of lower bitrates and cutting content before I finally decide on the solution: Cut the 5.1 audio from the DVD, and export some of the bonus content at lower bitrates. I was sad to cut the 5.1 audio from the DVD, and it’s the only place where the DVD and Blu-ray aren’t feature-equivalent, but I ultimately decided that the number of people likely to use the 5.1 audio from the DVD is like… 2, at the most. And if they care about the better audio, they’re likely to care about better image quality as well, and are likely to go watch the Blu-ray instead.
By the way, I had decided to go with a DVD/Blu-ray combo pack. Now, you probably know this, but Blu-rays allow for significantly higher quality than DVDs. The DVD standard was set in 1995! I’m honestly impressed that DVDs look as good as they do for a consumer digital video standard from 1995, but you have to admit that we’ve come a long way in digital audio quality since then. Anyway, so ideally, I would just have Blu-rays of the film made. But I know a lot more people have DVD players than Blu-ray players, so I kind of want both options to exist. Hopefully people that have access to Blu-ray players will watch the Blu-ray, but for those without access to one, they’ll still likely be able to watch the DVD. Probably. And also, I could make a separate case and “product” out of the DVD and the Blu-ray releases, but that would require even more work and would cost me more to have both printed and shipped. So I’ll just force both discs into the same case, and nobody will have to choose one or the other, they’ll just get both. That was my favorite solution to the problem.
I’m already getting so long winded. I’ll try to speed things up for the next points.
For the short films, the process was fairly easy. I just had to locate the final film files and do the dumb Windows Premiere 15.0 to 2013 Macbook round trip. Easy enough.
For the bloopers, I had to dig out my old bloopers I have made for a cast and crew screening and make sure they still held up. I decided they were good enough, and I just brought them in as they were.
The deleted scenes were a bigger task than I initially realized. Yes, content had been cut from the film. But the problem was that, 1, I didn’t actually just have all of the deleted scenes gathered together nicely in one place, 2, some of the scenes were deleted before I ever even edited them (I decided to cut them out of the film even while watching the raw footage), 3, most of the deleted “scenes” were generally small sections of scenes, rather than entire scenes (I think only one actual numbered scene from my script was cut out of the film in its entirety, and it was only like 10 seconds long), and 4, some of the scenes got cut because they were boring or because the performance just didn’t work in the way I wanted it to (that’s on my directing, by the way, not on the actor! I didn’t recognize on set, while we were shooting, that maybe a moment still needed an adjustment or that something wasn’t going to flow well in the bigger picture as we moved from one emotional beat to another).
This all made me question: What even IS a deleted scene? What are the deleted scenes we’ve generally seen on a DVD? Nobody wants to see a deleted scene that is super boring, that’s not worth anyone’s time. And a scene that makes a cast or crew member look incompetent, that isn’t good either! We can show bloopers of course, but it doesn’t feel right to show some of our sloppy work that had to be cut to make the movie watchable. I don’t want to show anything that might make anyone on the cast or crew look bad of course!
I ultimately gathered up 6 different “scenes” that were cut from the film. One of them I discarded because it was never even edited, and it was boring and wasn’t going to show anything worth showing (and would require a lot of extra work to make presentable. And what’s even the point of editing a scene from scratch for a deleted scenes list? I’m not supposed to be editing NEW scenes for this thing!). I discarded another one that was a lot harder for me to cut out of the movie at the time. It was an extension of a sort of heart-to-heart moment that Burd and Lana have in the lecture booth, when they’re talking about Burd possibly losing his job and then Lana potentially getting a promotion. This scene had some pieces I was really sad to lose: there was a reveal during this scene that Burd had actually gotten Lana the lecture hall job in the first place. I really didn’t want to cut this out, but it was attached to a lot of other dialogue that we determined wasn’t serving the film. There used to be a discussion during that scene about Lana’s position in the lecture job as the only woman in the department, and also about women and representation in the film industry in general.
Ultimately this stuff felt slightly too “preachy” to me and some early viewers of the film, and also I just felt like, who was I as a white guy to say this stuff. AND, it was feeling a little too “out of character” for the film. The film used to have a few other small moments like this (generally just a line or two), but by the end, many were cut for time, because they slowed the film down and often distracted a bit from the story at hand or the joke being made. So the film ended up without these moments, and the only vestige of that was this deleted scene that wasn’t funny at all and slowed things down too much right in the middle of the film. I ultimately decided not to include this deleted scene in the lineup either, because it just didn’t have many redeeming qualities on its own and without the context of the other nods to these topics that no longer existed in the film. And again, it wasn’t a funny moment either, so it’s not like it was a scene that could at least show off a cut joke. So I took it out.
Okay, that’s enough about the deleted scenes. I decided to show 4 deleted moments that I thought at least had some value, usually because they had some cut jokes or additional bit of context for some story beat.
Commentary tracks, these were fairly easy. At least, the director commentary ones were. I recorded them all in a single sitting. But the cast commentary one, that took a LOT of coordination to get all of the cast together. We ultimately did it on a google video call, after several false starts and attempts to find a date and time that worked for all 6 (or was it 7?) of us, but you know that audio would have sounded terrible, so I asked all the cast to record their own audio and send it to me at the end. And then I realized I had to edit all of those 7 audio tracks, to cut out background noise and make sure they lined up and make sure to cut out moments where maybe a dog barked or someone else in their household walked into the recording. Ouch. That was a big undertaking. And it made me realize that I couldn’t do it again for a crew commentary, AND it was going to be difficult to even get any crew that wanted to talk about the film anyway, so I cut the crew commentary track.
The freaking subtitles… Let’s quickly get the language part out of the way. The Italian film festival refused to send me the Italian subtitles they had me pay to have created, and they don’t respond to my emails to this day, so I gave up on the Italian subtitles. And without those, there was no good reason to pursue other languages, so I didn’t do those either. Subtitles were going to be in English only, and I had already paid to have some high quality closed caption SRT files made.
But, in trying to import these subtitles into Encore, I discovered that Encore doesn’t accept SRT files, and only accepts a format that, as far as I can tell, is proprietary and specifically for Encore. It’s not a special file type, just a .txt file formatted in a particular Encore-only way. Now, I can either just go through the film and re-type the subtitles by hand, which is painful, but technically doable. BUT, I’m on this ancient Macbook running old software, and it actually crashes fairly often, so this is looking less feasible by the minute. I eventually realize that this is the perfect job for ChatGPT. Now, I kinda hate ChatGPT and generative AI in general, but in this case, this was a perfect use case for ChatGPT. It was going to do extremely boring and tedious reformatting work that I wouldn’t wish on any human, and I couldn’t afford to have a human do it anyway, so it was going to be me doing it by myself and ripping my hair out as the software crashed.
But with ChatGPT, I could show it an srt file, then show it how Encore wanted the text formatted, and then say “Please reformat the text from the srt file into this Encore-specific format” and it was able to do it! Not easily, mind you. It kept making mistakes each time I would check its work, and I had to keep telling chatGPT “Okay let’s go back to step one, you’ve gone off course.”
Once the format was right, I discovered that the SRT file had 29.97-base timecode, but the film is at 23.976fps. So I had to ask ChatGPT to convert all of the 29.97 timecode to 23.976, which also took a few hours of arguing with it to get it to do it correctly. But once it did that, I plugged it into encore and discovered that the subtitles slowly drifted, and were around a full minute off by the end of the film. So now I had to ask ChatGPT to look at the timecode on the final subtitle, and then I gave it the timecode that the subtitle SHOULD start at. Then I told it that the subtitles were slowly drifting over the course of the film, and it needed to look at how much the final subtitle had drifted, and then recalculate all of the subtitles and offset them by slowly increasing amounts over the course of the film to try and make them match. Again, several rounds of arguments with ChatGPT later, I had a file that looked correct, and when I imported it into Encore, it seemed like we were golden. I watched the entire film over again with the new subtitles on (oh my god I’m so sick of watching my film over and over again), and voila, the subtitles were now perfect! Finally, we finished this part of the task. I also then did subtitles for the short films, this time just typing things out by hand because each file was only a few minutes long.
Next up were the two trailers. These were easy, just another trip to Windows CC2015 and then to the 2013 laptop.
The menu and scene selection were fairly straightforward, but still took a few days to pull together. What menu pages are needed? What images should I use for these menu pages? How can people toggle on and off subtitles? What fonts should I use? Have I made sure each page links to the other pages correctly, and is there always a back button so you can get out of each menu? Then for scene selection, what do I actually define as “scenes”? In a screenplay, a scene is every time there is a change in time and/or place. So SWD had about 115 scenes when defined this way. But that’s a scene every 45 seconds on average, so that won’t do. I decide that maybe approximately 5 minute chunks are good, because if you were skipping through the film by scene, this would let you jump to an approximate spot in the film fairly quickly. With that 5 min loose guideline, I end up breaking the film down into 18 “scenes”. Now each scene needs a name, and an image associated with it.. so that’s a few hours to get all that together.
And now I need to make sure that every scene button links to the correct scene, and that the button routing makes sense. If I currently have Scene 3 selected, and press to the RIGHT on the remote, which button should get selected? Should it loop back around and select Scene 01, or should it move down and start from the left with Scene 04?
I polled people on this, and people were fairly split, so I went with what made sense to me, and move to scene 04. And if you’re on Main Menu, and press right? I decided that’ll loop back around to scene 01. I don’t know if everyone will agree with it, but that’s what made sense to me. And if you were on 01, and pressed down, it would go to 04. Down again, it would go to Next. Down again, to Main Menu. And down again, and it would go to 02. I know that’s kinda weird, but when you press down while on Main Menu, it has to go somewhere, and it doesn’t know where you started, so it felt like the most natural motion to me was to loop back to the center top.
Oh and by the way, I have to rebuild the menus for the DVD and Blu-ray separately, so I kinda have to do all this twice. I can use notes from the first time I did it, so it’s faster the 2nd time, but it’s still painful to do all over again!
Finally, I need to do the disc and case art. Luckily, I’m mostly able to use assets that either my Art Department person, Hugo Fat, had already made (like the chicken drawing) and just change some colors or text, or I can use assets I already made for the distributor for streaming platforms or for the poster. Still, I’m not the best with Photoshop or graphic design in general, so I gotta take this part real slow and careful, and keep checking in for feedback. I’m fairly happy with the final result, though, considering I did it myself. I’m sure a real graphic designer could have done something better, but also a real DVD authoring shop would have done a better job with the DVD menus and features! And I couldn’t afford to do that, so this is going to have to be good enough.
Now, a bonus round of problems. I design the disc and cover art, and decide to print out a rough version of it so I can put it into a real Blu-ray case and see how it looks in person. Is the text large enough, do elements look centered or at least considered when out in the real world? I try to print it out, and it turns out that my color printer isn’t working right. It’s printing all these lines, and everything is only Cyan or Magenta, but no yellow. Clearly, I’ll need some more yellow ink. I dig through my stash of spare ink, and it turns out that the only one I don’t have is yellow. Great. I go order some more yellow ink online and go work on something else for a few days.
The yellow ink arrives, so I open up the printer to replace it. But it turns out that the printer doesn’t let me change the ink unless it is specifically in an ink-changing mode, which you can only get to if the printer tells you “You’re out of ink. Replace?” and then you can press okay. Otherwise there’s no way to tell it you want to change the ink, and if it’s not in ink-changing mode, it goes and tucks the inks in a back corner of the printer where they’re hidden in a little cubby of plastic and you can’t even see then. I check all the documentation, and there’s no way to trigger the ink changing mode. Great. Alright, I pull the power, open the printer, and try to move the cartridges out of their little nook, but it turns out that they throw on some sort of brake when they go into that nook, and won’t slide out. Great. So I decide to print something, and then pull the power in the middle of the job, so that the cartridges get stuck in the middle and never got back to their nook. This works (and by the way, this is what ChatGPT also recommended I do when I gave it the printer documentation and asked how I was supposed to change the ink if I wasn’t letting me get into an ink changing mode, though I had already come up with this plan myself by that time).
Now, new problem… it turns out that the catridges are held inside an additional plastic “container” that holds them all in place, and doesn’t let you really access them or get any kind of a grip on them to pull them out. If you go into ink changing mode, it will actually release the specific cartridge that you’re changing, and then it’s easy to grab and pull out to replace. But without the ink changing mode, the containers are all being tightly gripped by several mechanisms. I spend at least two hours messing around with this freaking printer, trying to find a way to manually trigger the release mechanism, and ultimately I’m able to do it and pull the yellow cartridge. Now I can turn the printer on, and it can tell me something is wrong and that I need to replace the yellow cartridge, so it can finally let me swap in my new one.
Except… it turns out that something else was wrong. The printer is still only printing in magenta and cyan. Maybe a nozzle is jammed or something, but I’ve already tried all the nozzle cleanings and print head alignments.
At this point, I give up and I drive to my local FedEx and just print the test art out with their in store printers. And after printing it out, I decide that some text did in fact need to be sized differently, and some elements needed to be more or less centered. So over several days, I keep driving back to my FedEx and printing out new versions of the case and disc art until I’m happy. (Though it turned out that the baby blue that their printer was showing me was very different from the disc printer’s baby blue for the Blu-ray discs, but at that point it was too late and I just signed off on it all. I was expecting some minor color shifts with different printers anyway, and this was the only thing that I didn’t like as much from the disc printers’ prints. So I just accepted it.)
Alright, let’s get to the final bit of fun. So, I’ve made all the menus and disc art and covers and stuff. I feel like I’m ready to send this to the disc printer and start a print run, but I decide to try and burn these DVDs and Blu-rays myself and just make sure everything is working. I do that, and I pass the discs out to some friends. About a week later, and we discover that one of the scene selection buttons isn’t linking to anything, and that the subtitles are on by default and don’t turn off when you try to turn them off, but otherwise everything is working right. Great, that’s an easy fix.
So I open up Adobe Encore, and suddenly, Encore is asking me for my serial number… something it never normally does. I don’t think I’ve typed this serial number in since I got the software back in like 2013… Do I even still have the discs? I had bought them as a student back when I was in college, so they were the “CS6 Teacher and Student edition” of the software. But that should be fine, right?
I eventually find the discs, and thankfully they have the serial number printed on the box itself, and inside the box I even apparently shoved the packing slip that the discs had originally shipped with. Basically it just says something like “May 2013, CS6 Teacher and Student editions, 1 set of discs” and then it has my dad’s name and address, since they were shipped to his house while I was a student.
I type in the serial number… and it says “This is not a valid serial number. Try again.” So I try again several more times, making sure I’m typing this ridiculously long string of random characters correctly. Each time, “This is not a valid serial number.” What’s going on? It lets me click “skip” if I want, and then claims that I’ll just be on a 30 day trial if I don’t have a valid serial number. That’s fine with me for now, I literally have like 5 minutes worth of changes to make and then this project is done forever and I might never have to use CS6 again. So I click skip, and try to open Encore again.
It then gives me a message along the lines of “Encore does not work in Trial Mode.”
Great. Wtf.
I try uninstalling all of CS6 and reinstalling, but I still have the same problem. Encore doesn’t run in trail mode, and my serial number isn’t valid. So I email Adobe, and they take 7 business days to email me back and say that my serial number isn’t valid. I email them a picture of my CS6 box with the serial number on it, and say that this number was working fine. They take another 3 business days to say “We’re looking into it” and then another 5 business days to tell me “So it looks like your serial number has been revoked.” They don’t offer me any solution to this problem.
I say “Well, can you un-revoke it? I’m literally in the final phases of a project here, and also I purchased CS6 legally and should be able to use this software.” They tell me I should try switching to their Cloud Subscription model… which, um, I already have that. But it doesn’t have Encore. That’s why I’ve turned to these old CS6 CDs. I’ve been a paying customer for years with the subscription service, AND I bought the physical CDs. I’ve given them all the money they could have wanted!
So they tell me that Encore is no longer supported. Yes, yes, I understand that, but I was using it until like a week ago no problem! I don’t need you to support it, I just need my god dang serial number to work.
This conversation goes on for I think about 3 weeks. Always “We’ll look into it”, and then ultimately saying “Why don’t you use the cloud” or “Encore isn’t supported anymore.” All I need is the serial number! Gah!
Ultimately, they bump me up to someone who isn’t just stuck on the same loop, and this person is able to tell me that they might be able to un-revoke the serial number (Nobody ever tells me why it was revoked in the first place. When I ask what happened, all they tell me is that it won’t happen again). All I need to have it un-revoked is my proof of purchase and my original receipts! No problem, I think, because I would definitely have received an email about this purchase, and I never delete my old emails.
Then, I slowly discover another horrible truth.
It turns out that I purchased the discs with my old college .edu email address. That makes sense, since I had to prove I was a student. And I still have access to this old email address, that’s no problem. BUT, Google just recent re-negotiated all their contracts with educations institutions, and basically all edu accounts which didn’t pay up (and that was most of them as far as I can tell) were dropped down to 5gb of storage (which is crazy, because even a free gmail account that anyone can make right now is 15gb of storage). And my account was over that 5gb line, so in order to make it fit, all emails that contained attachments had been deleted. Including any proof of purchase of these discs. Oh god.
So I scramble. I find the piece of paper I shoved into the CS6 box that contains the shipping information, and I actually find I also shoved a piece of paper in there that was just a printout of an Adobe email that had my serial numbers in it. And that adobe email actually mentioned where I had purchased the discs from, something like educationaldiscounts.com or something. I went to the website, and it turns out the website no longer exists, so they can’t verify anything for me…
So all I have is a packing slip with my dad’s name on it, an email from Adobe that also contains my serial numbers, and my CS6 box that has serial numbers on it and it has my school’s name mentioned in a barcode too. Hopefully that’s enough…?
I sent pictures of these three things to Adobe, and say this is the best proof I have, and that the school deleted the original receipt and the site I purchased from no longer existed.
They emailed me back, asking why the packing slip had a different name on it than mine. Oh boy, is this going to be the thing that prevents me from making two tiny changes to my DVD and finally being done with the project?
I tell them that it’s my dad’s name. Look, we have the same last name! And I was a student back then and had the discs shipped to his house.
Thankfully, they accept this explanation, and 7 business days later, I get an email saying that my serial number has been reinstated!
I excitedly rush to open the software again. And… the serial number still claims to be invalid. Another email to Adobe, 2 business days to tell me they’re looking into it, and 3 more business days to tell me that NOW, it should definitely be working.
I rush to Encore again… and still, the serial number is invalid. I email Adobe.
They bump me up to some new person, who basically tells me, in somewhat broken and difficult to understand English, that I’ll need to reinstall CS6 because there’s still some cache somewhere that seems to think the serial number is invalid. I reinstall CS6. Still this doesn’t fix the problem. The new person tells me that actually, I need to uninstall ALL Adobe software, not just CS6. This includes any other versions of the Adobe software, and things like Acrobat.
This is kind of a problem, because this is my machine that keeps a lot of old software that either doesn’t exist anymore, or doesn’t run on modern machines or operating systems, or is really hard to find. For example, some old versions of premiere like CC2017, which I specifically keep for issues like this where I need to open some old project or use some legacy feature.
I tell him about this, and he says “Sorry, the only way to get everything to work is to uninstall it all. You will lose access to some of these older versions of Adobe Apps because of this. Sorry.”
I fret over this decision for a few days, but ultimately decide to go for it. I’m very unlikely to pull this laptop out for anything after this DVD project is over. And the only thing I’ll really lose is a lot of old versions of photoshop and premiere that come after CS6 but before Premiere 2022 (the oldest one I can still download from their servers). Hopefully, I can survive without access to these old apps.
So I uninstall all Adobe software, then reinstall CS6. Still, the serial number doesn’t work…
The new guy tells me that there is probably some sort of old Adobe registry or cache item that is persisting even after I uninstall everything, and that this is actually a known issue for Adobe and that they have specifically created a piece of software to remove all “leftover” Adobe cache/registry items even after an uninstall. He sends me this internal bit of software, but it’s too old to install on my Mac. The mac is running MacOS 10.13, and the software requires 10.15 or newer. I tell him this, and he tells me to upgrade the MacOS. But… I know that MacOS 10.15 can’t run Encore. So if I upgraded my Mac, I would lose the ability to open the very software that I’m trying to open. He tells me that he’s not sure what versions of MacOS will support Encore. (Shouldn’t someone from Adobe be able to check on this better than I can?). I point him to multiple forums that say that 10.15 definitely doesn’t support Encore. He tells me “Sorry, the only thing you can try doing is updating to 10.15 and hoping Encore still works, I can’t help you any further” and he stops responding to emails. Eventually, he responds with a “I’ll push you up to a specialist” and leaves it at that.
Meanwhile, I have zero confidence in their specialist, because this “new guy” was supposed to be a specialist to begin with, and I’ve been arguing with them for weeks already.
So, I decide that maybe, I’ll have to completely wipe my 2013 Macbook and start with a fresh install. Their “new guy” never offered this option, but I suspected that this would deal with the parasitic registry/cache item. However, I would lose a lot of old software this way, and I can’t guarantee this old Macbook is going to hold on for much longer.
Thankfully, my partner has an old 2013 Macbook as well, and is fine with me wiping it if needed. So I decide to test it out. The CS6 CDs don’t work on it though, because she had updated her Macbook to MacOS10.15. (So I was right, none of this install was even possible on 10.15. Thankfully I hadn’t followed this guy’s advice and upgraded). I spent a while researching to find out that I can actually downgrade the Mac to an old OS, so I bring it to 10.13 and wipe it clean. Then install the CS6 CDs. Then input the serial number at the end of the CS6 install.
And, it works!! Finally, we’re at the finish line.
Or so I thought.
I try to open Adobe Encore, and it again asks for a serial number. I type the number in, and it tells me something along the lines of “Can’t connect to server.” Wtf. I try opening Photoshop CS6, no problem. All the other software opens just fine and doesn’t ask for the serial number again.
Hours of digging through forums, and I think I’ve identified the new problem. It turns out that MY 2013 Macbook had Adobe Encore CS6.0.2 installed, but my partner’s Macbook has Encore CS6.0.0, because that’s what was on the disc. And I definitely recall installing updates to CS6 on my 2013 Macbook back in the day. So I need to update Encore to CS6.0.2.
I click on Adobe Updates or whatever the app was called, and it saw updates for all of my CS6 software. I would click “update” and walk away for a few hours. But when I came back, it would say “Error” and show me that all apps BUT Encore had managed to update. I try reinstalling and restarting, but I always get back to this same place. Encore needs a serial number, and can’t connect to server once I type one in, because it’s out of date, but I can’t update it because it errors out every time I try to update it.
Another forum dive, and it sounds like Adobe Encore CS6.0.2 is still working for people and seems to be able to communicate with Adobe’s servers, but Encore CS6.0.0 doesn’t communicate with their servers anymore, and also the Encore 6.0.2 updates are no longer on their servers either…
I’ve gotten so far… but is this what will ultimately stop me? I have Encore installed on my Mac, I have a working serial number, but the software can’t talk to Adobe’s servers and it can’t update in order to be able to talk to their servers…
Another forum dive, and I find that someone has preserved the Encore CS6.0.2 patch files. I forget who it was, but thank you sir, I owe you big time.
I manage to install these files, and bam, Encore can communicate with their servers and finally accepts my serial number. We’re in!!! Who knew it was even going to be possible in 2024!?
Now, for the icing on the cake: I open my Encore project… or at least, I try to. But when I try to open the file, I get an error: File corrupted.
What the heck? Luckily I back up the heck out of my files, so I go grab a copy from a different hard drive and try opening it. Corrupted also, apparently. I go to a 2nd backup… also corrupted.
I also version my files obsessively, so this is like Version 9 of this project. So let’s try Version 8. All corrupted. 7… all corrupted. All the way down to Version 1, where it finally opens. But in version 1, I’ve done almost no work at all. I’ve imported only a few test files and set some basic settings. It’s basically useless, I would be better off starting from scratch at this point.
So, as an added bonus, I got to rebuild the entire DVD and Blu-ray once again. Luckily the menus were saved as Photoshop PSDs, and I had saved the timecodes for all of the chapter markers in a GoogleDoc, so I had all the information and settings I needed for the most part, I just had to manually import everything from scratch and recreate all the button routing and such. And again, I had to test one of these discs and again I found a few minor menu issues, but this time I was able to just jump back into Encore and fix them in a matter of minutes.
And with all of that out of the way, I was finally, FINALLY, finally able to send all of my files to DiscMakers and have them do a print run of the discs.
Was that all worth it…? I don’t know. It was an insane amount of anxiety and wall after wall of problems toward the end. I don’t know that it was worth all the time I wasted arguing with Adobe… and ultimately, I solved most of the problems myself, Adobe rarely helped. The only thing they ever managed to do was un-revoke my serial number, but that was their fault in the first place!
But, I do have to say that finally finishing the DVD/Blu-ray project felt freaking amazing. It was awesome to have persevered through all that I did. I felt like I managed to best Adobe, who had tried to screw this project over at every turn. But I had won!
And finally, I could return to true goal of all of this": Finishing Sorry, We’re Dead.
Except, now that I had physical copies of the film, there was so much more I could do. I could maybe get copies of the discs into local libraries, or into DVD rental locations, or maybe even into regular DVD stores? And definitely there would be cast and crew that would want copies. And I should probably just sell some of these on my website, right?
Turns out, nothing ever ends. Everything can keep going on forever. Whoops. Now it’s time to get the DVDs/Blu-rays out into the world. Then maybe once I’m done with that… then Sorry, We’re Dead can finally be done?
One can hope. I’m sure there will be no other steps I can take and that this is definitely the end of the project, for sure. I was wrong the other times but this time I’m definitely going to be right, no doubt about it. Definitely this is the end. Surely.
Oh and also you can get the same DVD/Blu-ray special features digitally from Vimeo On Demand, in case you’re interested in those deleted scenes and commentary tracks, but don’t actually want a physical DVD. Check it out here: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/sorryweredead