I recently finished burning DVDs of an hour-long movie I made of the first year of my children’s lives.

The final footage contains hundreds of video clips and 700 photographs — both of which are set to parts of approximately 30 songs.

The final Quicktime video was over 50 gigabytes and after iDVD did its thing, the entire hour fit onto a single disc.

We played it during the kids’ birthday, and it was a big hit. Going forward, the video will be a priceless piece of family history — memories that I am grateful to have such fast and easy access to.

However, as I worked (and worked…and worked…) on the piece though over the last couple of weeks, something became crystal clear to me: unless the process to create one of these works changes dramatically, digital video will never attain the popularity with consumers that digital photography.

Surprisingly, working with digital video is still a very complex, time-consuming, memory intensive and effortful process.

Everything takes a long time: watching the original footage, selecting the “best of” clips that you’ll ultimately work with, selecting a few photos from many, laying down the timeline, titles, transitions, volume matching, rendering, exporting, burning.

Take a step back to the HD camcorder I’m using (a Canon). It writes to SD memory cards. Once a card is filled, I copy the original footage to an external hard drive, so that I can always access a clean copy. That is backed up automatically to another hard drive using Apple’s Time Machine.

The whole thing is one massive schlep.

Plus, the storage and system requirements are massive. The working files alone (Final Cut calls this the scratch disk) for my one-hour video gobbled up over 250 gigabytes. The finished outputted video takes another 50 gigabytes.

The first time I tried burning DVDs, my MacBook Pro’s DVD burner couldn’t handle the Sony brand of recordable DVDs. After Googling it, I realized I wasn’t alone and went to buy Memorex DVD-Rs, which worked fine.

All of this is to say nothing of the initially awkward Final Cut (on a Mac) and Adobe Premiere (on a Windows PC) timeline interface. It’s like nothing most consumers have ever seen. On my Final Cut Express software, I am maybe using 20 percent of its functionality. Despite owning a couple of how-to books, I don’t know what most of the buttons on the screen do!

It would be hard for anyone to argue that this process, in this form, has no chance at mainstream success. The question is, what can be changed?

Apple tried to simplify digital video with its last couple of iMovie versions. They created a terrible, nearly unusable interface.

The problem is that most of the variables in the equation are fixed:

• High definition video takes up a ton of hard drive space.
• Video footage must be viewed, and cut down to the best parts for a final video. It cannot be glanced at like a photo.
• The timeline interface, while complex, is probably the best option available.

Short of using a simple “straight-to-Youtube” digital recorder like the Flip, any video footage that integrates photos, movies and music will require excessive time, space, and commitment — along with a healthy dose of frustration.

I think it’s simply reality, and it’s why most consumers will never take up digital home movies. It’s wildly unfortunate, but generations of consumers will simply lose out on home movies.