Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

On My Blog Menu:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue

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BSD Mall

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12/24/2001 - 12/30/2001
12/17/2001 - 12/23/2001

Monday, March 4, 2002
12:28 - Speaking of videocameras...	(top)
I got about 20 minutes of good video footage on tape this weekend, and while last night I wasn't capable of moving much more than my eyes, I couldn't resist hooking up the camera and seeing just how easy and fun iMovie is supposed to be. And the answer is... very. I'd used iMovie a few times in the past, mostly to try to put together silly little All Your Base-esque montages; I found that it was a bit clunky for that. I had to take existing MPEG clips, convert them to DV format, import them manually, split them repeatedly into little bite-sized pieces, and then try to tweak them around and squash and stretch them to fit the audio track that I was using. It wasn't really all that fun or intuitive, and in fact I found it very frustrating. But now that I have a camcorder, I understand what I was doing wrong. iMovie isn't designed for what I was doing with it. It's designed for people with camcorders. You plug in the camera, turn it to Play mode, and press Import in iMovie; it automatically plays the tape and sucks in all the video footage. And-- here's what I hadn't realized before that it did-- it automatically detects every scene switch, every place where you pressed the Record button, and saves each scene as a separate clip. That, I realized as soon as I saw it happen, is what makes it a killer app. You don't have to do any manual splitting. It handles all that for you; the palette of clips fills up all on its own, and the only times you have to split clips are to edit out the beginning and ending bits where the camera is staring at the cameraman's feet or is getting whipped around through distant trees as the cameraman fumbles for buttons. So after it finished importing, I had about 40 little clips in my palette, comprising 25 minutes of material. I started arranging them into order, and found that-- wonder of wonders-- it behaves much more smoothly doing the stuff it's designed to do than what I was forcing it to do earlier. Stitching together long clips of people skiing is much more up iMovie's alley than massaging a music video out of little chunks of Star Trek video-capture. So I kept working, enjoying what I was doing-- until at about 2AM I realized that as tired as I was, I had been playing with this video for about three hours. It was really that fun. And on the way in to work today, I kept thinking of new things to add: fade-ins, titles, cross-fades, and a music track. I'll be working on that tonight, most likely-- I don't think I'll be able to prevent myself from spending another three hours tweaking it and filing down the rough edges and... making what for anybody but myself is bound to be an unbearably dull thing to sit through. But hey, that's what personal technology is all about, right? Recitals, vacation videos, Christmas mornings? It's all for the happiness of the content producer, not necessarily for the consumer. Because for this kind of content, the two are the same.