I apparently don't have enough to do. I bought a video camera yesterday, a Canon HG10. There's no tape; it writes onto a 40gb hard drive. I spent much of today figuring out how to get the video out of the camera and onto my computer. Canon said one thing (you need to upgrade to Leopard), Apple said another (no you don't). I upgraded to the latest version of Tiger, and spent another fruitless hour until I figured out you had to put the camera on Play for it to connect. Duh.
I'm at the very bottom of a very steep learning curve. I haven't handled a video camera since one of those over-the-shoulder Sony units from 1973.
Here's my first reel, after I spent the rest of the day puzzling out iMovie.
Well that looks pretty good for a first try. Nice and clear. If you're going to get serious with video, take the time to learn Final Cut Pro. iMovie is fine as long as you keep it simple; once you start getting fancy it really is easier with FCP.
Posted by: Jack Nelson | November 18, 2007 at 09:48 PM
Coincidentally, I received a demo unit of the HG10 this weekend for a project I'm working on. Since I know this will come up, you'll need to think about how/where to store that footage when the camera's hard disk fills up. Fortunately, you can just drag the AVCHD-formatted files from the camera (when it's connected and shows up as a disk on your Desktop) to another hard disk or burn to a DVD. Doing so keeps the original footage in its compressed state; when you import to iMovie, the AVCHD is transcoded to Apple Intermediate Codec (AIC), which enables iMovie to edit it, but at the cost of a dramatic expansion of the media file sizes.
As I'm sure you discovered, that transcoding process is slow. A $30 utility called Voltaic can do the job outside of iMovie (say, while you're out and about with the camera). It's at http://www.mac1080hd.com/.
I wrote more about it at my iMovie blog: http://www.jeffcarlson.com/imovievqs/.
Also, as Jack says above, Final Cut Pro (or Final Cut Express 4, announced last week) is better for more serious editing. You can also cut together a rough in iMovie and then send it along to Final Cut.
Jeff
Posted by: Jeff Carlson | November 18, 2007 at 09:54 PM
Yesterday these terms were gobbledegook. Today they're merely incomprehensible jargon. It's evident after just one round that I want something more robust than iMovie. What I've actually done, of course, is uncover a new vein of material to blog about.
Posted by: Doug Plummer | November 18, 2007 at 10:52 PM
Doug I really like the looks of that video. It definitely does not scream out "video"...looks very high quality.
That said your storage woes are just begining I believe.
Paul
Posted by: Paul McEvoy | November 21, 2007 at 07:26 AM