One of the more superficial advantages of getting Mac OS X on yer machine is finally having access to the full range of iApps: iTunes, iPhoto, iCal, iMovie, iThis, iThat, iTheother. The most interesting of these potentially is iMovie as to my mind there’s never been a really simple, entry level video editing program on the market. I’ve seen a couple of professional packages but couldn’t manage to load a movie clip into them let alone edit it, so this was of interest.
As I’m sure you heard at least a year or two ago, it’s not that bad. Admittedly it’s as slow as fuck on my old 333mhz G3 iMac but that’s kinda to be expected. Once you’re clips are processed and loaded in it’s easier than Photoshop to crop, trim and shuffle them around, and so after an hour of playing, here’s my first movie.
Yes it’s 1.3meg of Macy the cat, but I’m kinda pleased with it. Video footage taken with standard digital camera in 15 second chunks with indoor lighting (hence the yellow). Soundtrack being Mad World by Gary Jules. The intention was to celebrate Macy’s insanity but it’s more a celebration of affectionate tiredness.
Hey, I made a movie! How much are proper DV cameras these days?
DV cameras? Lots. Lots and lots.
But if you’re buying, you might as well get Premiere too. Great fun can be had with that and it can do all the things that non-linear editing should do.
£600-700, though you can pick them up cheaper, you’ll want one that can tape directly to DV without loss of picture quality (mini DV will be your medium, high-res tapes).
As entry-level video editing software goes, i-movie rocks the Casbah. Simple enough I can use it with young people, but with enough fine control that it’s neither frustrating to use nor produces scrappy results. Lots of nice downloads on the apple site, too, (I hear!).
Premiere’s great, but not really worth it unless you’re going to rearrange your entire computer and memory management system around it, plus there’s a steep initial learning curve, and it can turn a just barely-affordable DV camera into an unaffordable video production system …
The cut-rate alternative is iSight. Not too expensive, not bad pictures etc. The downside is, unless you have a laptop, you are tied to your computer. Also, you need iChat to make it work. It works well with QuickTime Broadcast, as the following article describes:
http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2003/07/01/isight.html
An app called BTV carbon can turn your iSight camera into quite a useful little tool. Not much point in your getting an iSight Pete as they want at least a 600mhz G3 to work with iChat AV.
Thanks for all that but I’m not serious! Just that suddenly the idea of make little movies became a possiblity to me for the first time. Plus I reckon I’ll need to get a new compy first – no firewire on this baby and if iMovie takes 10 minutes to load in a 1 meg clip…
Now, if Apple did the same thing with audio – iRadio anyone? – I’d be there in a second. I’ve got some ideas for the two tracks of audio of iMovie already…
I appreciate this is a shameless plug, but Hack #26 from Mac OS X Hacks explains how to build a Web Radio Station from an ADSL, MP3s, QuickTime Streaming Server, Promo Music and Microphone, iMovie and iTunes.