4th year film student screening, night one

After two days of monkeying around with it, I finally got the selections we made of student films onto dvd for  consideration at TIFF. The problem I had was that two of the files were over 5 gigs each and were on a Mac computer.  We may need the large files in the future, but at present we just need a standard definition version for a regular dvd for adjudication  The 5 gig files could not be written onto NTFS drives (which will handle the large files but cannot be used by macs) nor onto FAT drives, which cannot use these large files. The new format of Mac drives cannot be used on a PC, so it meant that I had to get a drive formatted in this way and then only move them to another Mac, which was very limiting. Once moved, the files would not export on the Mac over at the NMSL. No errors came up, but the sessions would just stall for hours. I eventually got one in a more compressed form from the student and the other I had to move to a slightly newer machine in our department for conversion. It's an important project for us to do, but we need an easier way to go about it.
William had the day off school. I left him home alone all morning to finish this dvd thing, and this afternoon he had a friend over so I didn't spend time with him like I'd wanted. In fact, I went out all evening to the fourth year film screening (image above) which was quite good. In the image, the blurred person to the right is Billy, one of my second year students, who won this year's Oser prize for best critical essay. Impressive.