PC Guy with a Mac

I was able to finish the importing of both my Christmas 2007 videos as well as my son Braeden’s two-year birthday party from DV tape to the MacBook’s hard drive without a hitch.

Editing the video worked very well and was very intuitive. Even though I have gone through the same type of processes before with regards to importing and editing movies, I feel that if I was totally clueless on the process that iMovie would have made things very simple for me to understand and utilize.

I am disappointed that I am missing out on a lot of the advanced features that were originally included in iMovie (as mentioned in my previous posts), but I guess I can’t miss what I never had.

Well, Christmas is over (woot!) and my son Braeden’s second birthday party on the 27th is now in the books. All that is left from the mayhem is credit card debt, discarded gift wrap, and a stack of three video tapes to be transferred over to DVD for posterity.

Now is the perfect time to really put iMovie through the ringer.

In the past, when arguing with MacTards about what makes the Mac OS so great, mention was always made of the inclusion of iMovie in the purchase price.  When I first cracked open the MacBook, one of the first things I tried out was iMovie, since I was in a position to compare it to Microsoft’s rival product, Windows Movie Maker.

As far as layout and usability was concerned, I found myself more comfortable with iMovie than I was when I first started using Windows Movie Maker, even though both products pretty much do the same thing and act in the same way.

One of my first projects was to create the banner animation for my new blog (which appears above).  I utilized iMovie and the MacBook’s built-in camera, along with Adobe Photoshop (PC version) and Macromedia Flash 8 (PC version).

In trying to get iMovie to do what I wanted it to do, I was thinking about modifying the background of my videos by using a green screen.  I turned to the web to see how people used green screens with iMovie (since I couldn’t find anything about it in iMovie’s help system or in the menus) and found that there used to be support for green screen functions in the past, but the version of iMovie that came loaded on my shiny, new MacBook was stripped of this (and many other) features.

Oh well, I didn’t own a green screen, and I was able to get the look and design that I was after, so I let it go (for now).  The true test will come when I turn my attention to 2+ hours of videotape that lay before me.  The story continues..

Got this gem from one of my technicians this evening:

http://www.evilmilk.com/pictures/Gay_Test891.jpg

The one on the left has that crappy keyboard and mouse I wrote about earlier, so I guess I like the one on the right. Whew! My closet door remains firmly shut (for the time being)!