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This article first appeared in the October 2000 issue of the Louisville Computer News. It was written by Lee Larson.
Seven or eight years ago, with the Quadra AV series, Apple started claiming you could do video editing at home on a personal computer. Of course, they were wrong. The AV Quadras were just barely fast enough to take a video input to disk, and when you got it there, the things you could do to it were pretty crude, complicated and annoyingly limited without additional equipment worth thousands of dollars.
Things certainly have changed.
Early last summer we decided the old Hi8 camcorder was not worth repairing. This would be bad news for most people, but for those of us who are always in the grips of a raging techno-lust, such events are golden opportunities to feed the habit. From my viewpoint, two of the things broken on the old camcorder were that it wasn’t digital and was built before Firewire was invented.
Firewire is Apple’s name for a high-speed plug-and-play serial connection system they developed in the early nineties, and are now building into all Macs, except the entry-level iMacs. It’s sort of like USB on steroids. The official name for the protocol is IEEE 1394. Sony is also building it into many of their audio and video boxes, but they call it iLink.
Whatever you call it, Firewire can move data in and out of a computer as fast as 400 megabits per second, and this is fast enough to transfer digital video in real time. All the new digital camcorders are coming with Firewire ports, and this makes it possible to edit high quality sound and pictures on a fast computer, such as the Macintosh G3 or G4.
Consumer grade digital camcorders come in two flavors. The most common are the ones based on the MiniDV tapes that are a little smaller than a standard audio cassette. A newer format, introduced a year or so ago by Sony, called Digital8, uses standard Hi8 camcorder tapes. Both tape formats store exactly the same digital data and have the same capabilities. The MiniDV cameras are generally a little smaller, but the Digital8 cameras can play back the older 8-millimeter tapes. Blank MiniDV tapes seem to be sold only in places that sell the cameras, and cost twice as much as Hi8 tapes. You can buy Hi8 tapes at any big discount store.
After trying many different brands, I settled on the Sony TRV320, a Digital8 model that also takes reasonably good digital still pictures. At the time, the smaller size of the MiniDV machines was mighty enticing. The tie-breaker was the stack of older 8-millimeter tapes taken with the broken camcorder. They can’t be played on the MiniDV machines, but the Digital8 models play them just fine. I’ve since had a chance to use several of the MiniDV cameras, and subjectively it seems the larger size of the TRV320 allows larger optics, which give better performance in dim light.
Apple’s really been pushing digital video again, and this time it seems the times have finally caught up with their ambitions. Firewire, fast computers, huge hard drives and digital cameras solve the hardware end of the problem. Bundling their entry-level digital editing software, iMovie, with all the Firewire equipped Macs solves the software problem.
Using a digital camcorder, such as the TRV320, with iMovie couldn’t be simpler. Just plug the camera into the Firewire port on the Mac and bring up iMovie. A palette of familiar buttons that looks like a VCR remote lets you drive the camera to import video or write it back. Thanks to Firewire, this is all done in real time with no loss of fidelity.
Being an Apple program, iMovie has the familiar Mac drag-drop-point-click interface, and a limited, but effective collection of tools for editing, titling and transitioning between video clips. It’s not nearly as powerful as its big brother, Final Cut Pro, but it’s much easier to use and doesn’t cost $1000. I was able to do surprisingly pleasant-looking work almost at once after reading no documentation. Don’t expect to make the next Blair Witch Project with iMovie. It’s good for removing those accidental pictures of the ground and sky, and to compile birthday videos of the kids for their cyber-savvy Grandma. On top of this, it’s a lot of fun!
That’s not to say there aren’t some shortcomings.
iMovie eats hard drive space for breakfast and comes back early for a big lunch. Any but the lightest work needs as much as five gigabytes of free space. Keeping several projects around can eat up your ten gigabyte iMac drive in a big hurry. This may be one of the reasons Apple is the only big computer maker really pushing DVD-RAM drives. They’re about the only way to archive projects and move them between machines without writing back to tape.
Another annoyance is that some things are just so processor intensive they take a long time, even on a G4/450. Complicated transitions and fades can take thirty seconds or more to render. This doesn’t sound like much, but a complicated project may require dozens of transitions, each done several times to get things just right.
Saving to QuickTime is the real time killer. In his keynote at MacWorld, Steve Jobs suggested you start a QuickTime save and then take the family out to dinner. It got a big laugh, but he wasn’t kidding. Converting a ten minute video to QuickTime on that G4/450 might take three hours. You could take the family out for breakfast and lunch while iMovie is eating your hard drive.
After you have the QuickTime file, there’s the problem of what to do with it. A five-minute video rendered to QuickTime at a medium resolution is likely to yield a multi-megabyte file–too big for Grandma’s e-mail. One solution is to burn it onto a CD, and mail the disk. But, then you might as well save it to tape and mail that; the video and sound quality would be a lot higher.
Trying to address this problem, Apple has recently introduced new features to their iTools Web site (www.mac.com), allowing users to stream QuickTime movies. Anyone with a PowerMac can get an iTools account for free and place up to 20 megabytes of streaming video on their personal web page. If Grandma has QuickTime 4 installed on her machine, whether it is a Mac or that other brand, she’ll be able to watch.
Apple is serious about desktop video because they hope it will be the next big thing. iMovie 2.0 was introduced at July’s MacWorld, and is now being shipped with most new Macs. It’s also available online for $50 from the Apple Store (www.apple.com).
Interestingly, Apple is giving away iMovie 1.0 as a free download (www.apple.com/imovie). The older version is a capable program that’s a good place to start out. Version 2.0 fixes some annoying limitations in the older version, chief of which is the twelve-clip capacity of the workbench shelf. If you already have version 2.0, the same site is where you can pick up the 2.01 upgrader and an enhancement pack with some interesting new transitions and sounds.
For years Apple has been promising the holy grail in the form of their new operating system called Mac OS X. (That’s "ten" as in Super Bowl X, not "ex" as in Malcolm X.) Apple describes it as having the best features of both the Mac and Unix. In fact, it’s actually a modern BSD Unix with a lot of GUI tools and a slick-looking graphical interface called Aqua. The bulk of it has been shipping for quite a while as the core of Mac OS X Server, and the Mach/BSD kernel has been available as open source for more than a year.
As promised last summer, the Mac OS X beta was made available in mid-September. Since it is a beta release, there are bound to be some problems with it, so beware!
Too big to download, Apple is shipping the beta on CD for $30. More information can be found on the Mac OS X support pages (www.apple.com/macosx).
Steve Wozniak, an Apple cofounder, will be the keynote speaker at AppleVention 2000, a one-day event sponsored by the Cincinatti-based AppleSiders user group. It will be held October 21 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on the NKU campus in Highland Heights.
Also featured will be a concert and music editing demonstration by world renowned recording artist Suzanne Ciani. This 5-time Grammy nominee is a pioneer in the field of electronic music and sound design as well as a devoted Apple computer user.
Advanced registration is now available at the AppleSiders’ Web site (www.applesiders.com). Register early as seating is limited. Admission at the door is $20.
At the October 24 meeting of the Louisville Computer Society, Harry Jacobson-Beyer will speak about Internet legends, scams, and how to find out if e-mails purporting to warn of viruses or asking people for money are real or myth.
The Louisville Computer Society meets from 7:00-9:00 P.M. at Pitt Academy, 4605 Poplar Level Road, at the intersection of Poplar Level Road and Gilmore Lane. Everyone is welcome to attend. For more information, on the web go to www.aye.net/~lcs, or e-mail lcs@aye.net.
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