confessions of a serial hobbyist

Apple recently announced it’s new iLife ‘08 Digital Lifestyle application suite. Most of the apps got some nice new features, but iMovie was selected to be completely replaced with an entirely different application (albeit still named iMovie).

And in doing so, it was made easy for people who don’t enjoy video editing, and made useless to those that do…

First off, we’ll look at a before and after:

Before (iLife ‘06 / iMovie HD):

After (iLife ‘08 / iMovie ‘08):

The first thing to notice about iMovie ‘06 is that it includes a LARGE viewer of my 1080i footage (filmed as 1080p24…I love my Canon HV20) to show more detail. In iMovie ‘08 I have a much smaller view, and have to view fullscreen to get much detail.

In iMovie ‘06, on the right is your bins of footage. These are clips imported for THIS PROJECT, because frankly if I’m editing a small movie I only want clips for that movie, not footage I shot three years ago for something else. iMovie ‘08 takes up the majority of the screen filling the bottom half with a selection of every clip you’ve ever shot (though to be fair, it does let you narrow it down, and lists by clip). You can argue yourself as to whether or not it’s more powerful, or just more information you likely don’t want/need. iMovie ‘06 shows one picture per clip, while iMovie ‘08 can either show one per clip, or one per every .5, 1, 2, 5, 10, or 30 seconds of a clip. In iMovie ‘06 if you want to add a clip to your project, you drag it down to the timeline, and then trim. In iMovie ‘08 you select within the clips clicking and dragging (each clip is like its own mini-timeline) and then add that selection to your movie.

iMovie ‘06 gives you the option of per-clip views of your movie flow, or a more standard timeline (seen in my screenshot). In timeline view you can see your clips lengths, edit them based on time, and also align footage and audio down to the frame in order to line things up nicely. You have timecode based support for fading in / out audio, switching effects, etc. In iMovie ‘08 you have some videos you added on the top (this and the clips list can be swapped), and you can throw in a song or sound effect by just dragging the file the clip you want it to play during. iMovie ‘06 shows your audio via a nice waveform, allowing you to look for spikes in the audio and other features of the audio for betting syncing of audio and video. iMovie ‘08 gives you a green line to say there’s audio there. I haven’t found a way to do much more with footage or audio in iMovie ‘08.

I really liked iMovie HD, because I saw it as a near complete (albeit low-weight and low-priced) video editing solution. I could see using it to edit small videos and even short movies without much worry, because it was basically Final Cut Express-Express, a more light weight version of their more professional products. iMovie ‘08 on the other hand is designed for people who want to take some movies, throw them together, and spit out the results. Don’t get me wrong, there’s certainly a market for that, but it’s not me.

One place where iMovie ‘08 does a nice job over iMovie ‘06 is the sharing options, as it allows you to easily export to multiple files (with simple options such as mobile phone, iPhone, small, large, DVD, etc). In iMovie ‘06 I’d have to do each export separately, one at a time. Being able to select multiple export targets at once means I can tell it to export, and get some sleep for the night while it churns out a bunch of highly encoded h.264 files.

I honestly think iMovie ‘08 does a better job of fitting the iLife target audience better than iMovie ‘06 did, it just bothers me because I’m not strictly in that target audience. I’m more apt to enjoy Aperture over iPhoto, and Final Cut over the new iMovie (neither of which I own yet). I already use Logic, not Garage Band, when recording audio. It’s a bonus to the consumer, and a strike against the prosumer on this one…

I’ll say one good thing - it doesn’t overwrite iMovie HD when you install iLife ‘08, and if you’ve registered your copy of iLife ‘08, Apple allows you to download iMovie HD for free. Obviously other people are seeing the same frustrations I am.

In closing I’d like to thank my son for volunteering the footage of his first steps used in those screenshots - yes he really is that adorable in real life.

Ah let’s see here, where to begin…
How about with The Sopranos Finale.

Why.
A LOT of people are quite upset by the ending. Frankly I think I get it, but I still don’t like it. The easiest explanation: they knew no matter what they couldn’t make an ending everyone would like, so they chose to make one people would certainly talk about. I think it sucks, especially as someone who’s reading more about film making and script writing. I just think it’s a terrible let down to people who have invested years in your character’s lives. But on the other hand, they can get away with it. I’m assuming one of two scenarios. One is that they just couldn’t decide on which of the possible endings to use and so Chase just stood up and said fine, you don’t like any of my endings, we won’t have ANY ending. HAPPY? Or possibility two, is that he decided he doesn’t care if we don’t like him anymore (his show’s off the air and he’s rich as can be) and knows that ending this way will just force many people to buy the DVD set with the 3 alternate endings or what not. Oh well, not like it matters now…

Next up, let’s see here…
WWDC? Sure I’m a huge Apple-whore these days and look forward with child-like glee to most keynotes given by “the Steve” so of course I watched yesterday. And while watching something struck me that I’ve noticed but never put a finger on before. So much of what Apple does with its software is to simplify workflows. Unfortunately for me as someone who spends a good chunk of his time still writing code (atleast until one of my screenplays sells…which I suppose means I would have to finish one of them) they’re all useless. Software engineers have largely had automated workflows for years. We press a button, everything gets built and packaged and runs. Boring, but there’s all the workflow automation we need? What it ends up meaning is I see all these cool features Apple shows off and end up saying, much like I do when I see most new gadgets, man I WISH I had a need for that…but I don’t.

And then there’s the iPhone development model…
more on that in another post coming soon.

As time goes on it seems that life gets more and more busy.
And yet for some stupid reason I seem to gain more and more hobbies. Go figure.

I’ve had my rather awesome Canon HV20 HDV camcorder for a while now, and other than a few snippets of my son trying to walk I’ve barely gotten to use it. It’s one of those things where I want to go out and shoot some scenes, especially as there are some very movie-esque areas around here. But there just doesn’t seem to be much time to go out and do something just because I want to. Just about everything has to have a reason or benefit or I have difficulty justifying the time. Is it just me or is that sad? Are our lives really that over-run with stuff that there’s no time to do something just because we want to?

Then there’s my script. I started writing it, finally. A few pages of the beginning, and a few pages of the middle are written. I just have a hard time finding the time to write more. Sure I know, I’m writing this and could be working on my script, but this is something I can write here and there over time and publish when it’s finished. The constant interruptions don’t affect this as much, where-as when writing my script, I really need to just focus on the writing for long periods of time to really get flowing. And on top of the script I’ve started, I have two more script ideas I want to get down. Someday I’ll get the chance I suppose.

So what is it…is it just me that has this problem? Do I just have screwed up priorities and other people have time for their hobbies? Or is this something everyone faces?

So in deciding that I want to pursue screenwriting and possibly even make a small ultra-low-budget movie (most likely a short) I decided it was time to get a new camcorder, one I could actually use to capture video that I could then use and edit. So after some thought, and reading over a ton of reviews at CamcorderInfo.com I narrowed down my criteria:

1. It had to be Hi-Def. Buying anything standard-def these days is just buying obsolescence.
2. It had to have a mic-in port. If I’m going to do any hobbyist shooting (beyond recording my son to send DVD’s to the grandparents) then I’ll want to use a nice shotgun mic and boom for getting better audio, and having the camcorder record it onto the same tape as the video is easier than managing separate recordings and trying to sync it all up in post.
3. It needed decent manual controls. I don’t need to be able to tweak every little thing, but I want atleast a basic level of control over how the footage will end up.
4. It had to me affordable. So this instantly killed my first choice, the $3500 Canon XH A1. Let’s face it, $3500 is a whole lot of pissed-off-wife to have to face.
5. It had to be a format that’s easily editable. This IMMEDIATELY canceled out the plethora of AVC-HD camcorders. Sure h.264 is great, but a camcorder that records in a format that just about nothing supports means it’s not so useful. HDV won out here, as it’s editable (or atleast importable) by just about everything, and $5 MiniDV cassettes make for cheap archival.

And so, after searching, and waiting, and looking, I settled on my choice, the Canon HV20. It records in 1080i OR 1080p24 (24fps progressive scan…it has a certain cult following), it has a mic-in port, it has decent manual controls, and it’s HDV. Now the price was a bit more than I was hoping to spend, but between finding some good deals and using some online coupons I took a decent chunk out of the MSRP.

So far I haven’t had too much of a chance to use it (had it a day now) but I’m pretty happy with it. It’s comfortable to hold and use, and the button layout fits my hand pretty well - I can reach each of the buttons without stretching. If I get a chance to use it some more, maybe I’ll toss up some footage recorded to give people an idea of the quality…but it’s crisp. I should note that this is the only HD video source in my house - I have a 32″ HDTV but none of my inputs are HD, so maybe that’s why this looks so crisp to me. But overall, it’s a nice camcorder so far, and after a bit more use…or abuse…I’ll post a followup.

As people, we all have a hard time giving up on the bad ideas we have, that we just can’t let ourselves believe are really bad. As I had mentioned, one of my current hobbies is screenwriting, or maybe I should say the idea of screenwriting, because I’ve yet to even half-finish a script. But I have my idea, I think it’s fun, and cool, and could be a good movie. So what do I do? I mention it to some friends to get feedback. And I get the same response from all of them, the dull, uninterested, “oh, yeah, that could be cool I guess.” So the natural response, atleast for me, is to tell myself well maybe they just don’t get it, or maybe I just didn’t explain it well enough in my 2 sentence blurb. But ya know what? Maybe it really isn’t that great of an idea.

There’s a quote I came across on another blog (Tommi’s S60 Blog) recently:

“Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap.” — Ira Glass

Oh how depressingly true that is. We all want to believe we’re smart, that our ideas are good, that our jokes are funny, etc. It’s easier to believe that other people just don’t “get it” than to admit maybe just a little, the idea is crap. And so the less-than-half-written script for screenplay idea number one is in the trash (well actually it’s in a random folder sitting on my laptop, but same difference).

I’ve been reading a number of blogs, articles. whatever I can on the technical side of script writing. Now that I discovered the first idea just maybe was crap, I just need to find something else. Or who knows, maybe the best plan is while I don’t have another idea, continue working on the crap, after all, even a bad script could have a few good scenes come out of it that I’ll want to use in something else.