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I have a little bit of sympathy for Janet Jackson.
As someone who is less than concerned about my outfits, not to mention having
horrific color blindness, I have had my own wardrobe malfunctions from time to
time. And, while my wardrobe mistakes haven't been broadcast on global TV to
hundreds of millions of viewers, it got me thinking about the troubles I have
had in dealing with my own video productions and how hard they are to get on
the air.
One of my hobbies, if you can call it that, is to
mine the archive of unwatched family videos and produce short five- or 10-
minute segments that can be seen over and over and enjoyed for the memories
that they represent. We have all filmed these endless movies of family holiday
gatherings, our children's precious moments, and so on. The trouble is that
once you film them you almost never watch them, or watch them rarely more than
once.
Digital editing comes to the rescue, and while it is
a time-consuming affair, it is a lot of fun. You can compress these hours of boredom
into a few short minutes, and you can impress your family and friends with your
production values. You still have to sit in front of the computer and watch the
movies in real time, but at least then you have the satisfaction of removing
those awkward moments and boring scenes where nothing much is happening.
The trick here is to have a Sony Digital 8mm video
camera, so you can view your old analog 8mm tapes but still use the digital
editing software to cut and paste scenes and provide the special effects,
titles, and audio tracks that make the movies come to life. Sony is one of the
few vendors left that make a Digital 8 camera -- most of the others have gone
the way of the dodo. On their web site they are selling four models for under
$500. You need a Digital 8 camera rather than any other media (such as miniDV) because the camera can play back both digital and
analog 8mm tapes. (It can only record digitally of course.) If you are like me,
you have invested dozens or hundreds of hours in the old analog 8 tapes. You
could buy an analog to digital converter but the cost for a new camera isn't much
more.
So over the past several weeks I have been doing a
lot of video creation, taking a friend's old analog 8mm movies and turning them
into DVDs, using an Acer Aspire laptop with a built-in DVD burner. In the
process, I have tried several different Windows video editing tools, only to
walk away from the process tremendously dissatisfied and feeling that maybe it
is me, or maybe I need someone like Justin Timberlake to just rip the covers
from my eyes and see the naked truth.
As they said in the MTV control room on Sunday
night,
The conclusion that I have come to is if you want to
produce videos on a computer, buy a Macintosh and use iMovie.
This is one of the best pieces of software that I have used in my entire
career. It just works, and works well enough that the amateur videographer can get the job done. You don't need to be an
expert in video drivers, codecs, or to understand how
to perform major surgery on your operating system. You just plug in your
camera, fire up the software, and hit the record button. That's it.
All recent Macs come with firewire
built-in, which is the connector of choice for doing videos. You don't need to
worry about finding a special firewire card or having
to update drivers for particular Windows OS versions that aren't firewire-friendly (such as Windows 98). As I said, it just
works.
The same is true for Apple's iPhoto
software, by the way. You don't need to load camera drivers, or mess around
with the software that is supplied by the camera vendor. You just plug in your
camera, and go upload your photos and you are done.
There is one exception that I have found in my
travels with digital photography, and that is you might need to upgrade your
Mac OS to at least System 9 -- older versions won't work on some of the newer
cameras. But once you do that, you are good to go. And while the System 9
versions of iMovie and iPhoto
don't have all the bells and whistles of the newer OS X versions, they are good
enough and you don't have to upgrade to use them, something that is more common
in the world of Windows.
My colleague Gayle is one of our fellow editors here
at VARBusiness -- where we use Macs to produce our
magazine. She was shopping for a new PC. Ironically, she was close to buying a
great HP Windows machine, but luckily was convinced to stick with a Mac. She's
had the new Mac for close to a week and is very happy, and has been enjoying
the ins and outs of iPhoto versus the old
Windows-based software that she used to use. It is ironic that even people who
use Macs for their work would consider Windows first, but such is the nature of
the
Apple is far from perfect: I wish they would have a
desktop G5 for less than $1,000 without a monitor, or a
iBook that came with a DVD burner. Both are missing from their current product
lineup. And they still haven't figured out what their enterprise sales strategy
is, despite having a decent line of servers and storage devices. But when I go
back into my editing room, I use my Mac and leave the Windows closed. Maybe
someday someone will invent a wardrobe-matching program for me and prevent
future malfunctions. After all, a guy can hope.
Entire
contents copyright 2004 by David Strom, Inc.
David
Strom, dstrom@cmp.com, +1 (516) 562-7151
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