Writers Block Live

Since starting this book I’ve occasionally been accused of being a Steve Jobs apologist. I can see how it might look that way. Even when I’ve written about being chewed out by Steve, I tended to focus on the positive aspects of the situation. Well, this book is just getting started and this is not one of those situations.

It was August 31, 2001, and I had already been in Richmond, Virginia for three days preparing for Steve’s presentation. He was coming to inaugurate the much heralded program that would give every student in Henrico County an iBook to use. Soon the hall would be filled with hundreds of students, parents, adminstrators and media types.

The gear was all set and and I had finished installing and testing iDVD, along with the sample files that Steve would use in his demo. I was just waiting for Steve to show up to run through the demo and make any last minute adjustments. I felt totally ready (what a fool I was.)

The video clips and photos to be used had been selected a few days earlier at a meeting with Cheryl Vedoe, who was Apple’s Vice President of Education Marketing. For that meeting I had prepared an iDVD project with all the education-focused movies which Steve had approved and used before, and ran through it with Cheryl who made the final selection. The choices were simplified somewhat by the fact that Steve had demonstrated iDVD only a few weeks earlier to a huge audience of educators at the NECC keynote in Chicago. We had spent a lot of time and effort preparing samples for that event, so it was natural to draw on some of the same material.

Once Cheryl ’signed off’ I had to wait for Steve to decide exactly which items he wanted. He would normally do this the day before a keynote, or at least several hours in advance, so there would be enough time to prepare and burn the disc which he would play as part of the demo. In those days it would take a minimum of an hour for iDVD to encode and write even a short disc. After Steve made his choices, I would then set up a clone of that project on my computer backstage and burn the ’show’ disc and a backup. On the whole, the system worked well.

But this presentation was different; Steve was not going to come early to rehearse so I was instructed to organise the files on the computer and burn the finished discs in advance based on the selections Cheryl had approved. When Steve arrived shortly before showtime, I could simply show him where everything was, and we’d be all set.

Too bad Steve didn’t go along with the plan.

It was about an hour before showtime when Steve sat down at the desk. Launching iDVD, he made a new project, chose the ‘chalkboard’ theme and named his main menu. So far so good. Then he went for the folder I had placed on the desktop to grab some movies; he opened it and hesitated. “Where is the ‘gravity’ movie?” he snapped (referring to a short movie that some students had made to explain gravity.) “We didn’t bring it” I said.

“I have to have that one…you know I always use that movie in my demos!” he blasted.

My internal reaction was ‘no, I don’t know that you always use that movie. In fact, you seem to never want to use the same samples twice, which I’m sure is why Cheryl decided not to include that particular movie this time, since you’d already used it at three major events.’ More importantly, I was asking myself why Cheryl wasn’t coming to my aid. I knew she was there somewhere, and it had been her instructions that caused the current dilemma. But she did not appear. Of course I was too much of a coward to actually verbalize any of that, but I managed to respond that ‘I brought the material that I was told to’. Steve insisted he had to have the ‘gravity’ movie. This was a pretty big problem, because I didn’t have that QuickTime movie with me, and even if I did there was not enough time to encode it and burn a new iDVD disc before the show started.

When I told him this, he got even more upset. “you figure out a way to do it…” Then I remembered that I did have that video with me in one form, on an already burned DVD that had been made for another event. Unfortunately, the DVD had completely different themes and menus, so could not be used at this presentation.

In spite of my anger at being chewed out for doing exactly what I was asked to do, I managed to come up with an idea. I called for the producer to see what he thought. ‘What if we have two DVDs?’ I asked him, ‘one with the correct menus and all the other clips and a second disc that just has the ‘gravity’ movie but the wrong menus; could they switch from the video output of one player to the other just when Steve chooses the button to play gravity, while at the same time someone un-pauses the second player that has the correct movie already queued up?’ ‘Sure…maybe…let’s see if we can make that work.’ he responded, not inspiring much confidence. I explained the idea to Steve and he agreed it would be OK.

Now I just had to make it work. I had less than an hour to make a new DVD that looked just like the original iDVD project but had a button with the thumbnail for the gravity movie that jumped to a ‘dummy’ blank menu. Fortunately, I had partly anticipated this type of problem. In advance I had prepared Photoshop files that mimicked the iDVD menu templates which I could use in DVD Studio Pro. They allowed me to create DVDs that looked like they have been done with iDVD. I also had MPEG encoded versions of all the approved movies on my PowerBook’s drive. So all I had to do was figure out how to get a thumbnail of the ‘gravity’ movie from the existing DVD, put it in the menu template, set up a DVD Studio Pro project that looked like Steve’s iDVD project, multiplex it and burn the disc. Piece of cake.

I worked frantically, trying not to misspell any of the button names as I threw the DSP project together in record time. I popped in the blank disc and started the build and burn process. It was going to be a race to the finish. By my calculations there would be only a few minutes to spare once the disc finished, and we really needed to test it at least once. I’ve never seen a progress bar move as slowly as it did that day.

The disc popped out, I ran over to the second DVD player backstage and queued it up. We tried the switchover and it was perfect; looked exactly the same as if it was playing from the first disc. I took my first breath in about an hour.

The presentation was a smooth as silk and the audience was thrilled. In the meantime, I’d just about given myself a heart attack jumping through hoops so Steve could play a silly movie that wasn’t really any better than the one it replaced. As usual, Steve had gotten his way. But I was pissed.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 22nd, 2006 at 2:08 pm and is filed under Close Encounters. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.