Ready to Use the Mac for video editing?
When I bought my little Canon ZR800 DV camera, the first time I downloaded video it was to Jane’s Mac Mini. I created a little slideshow of Kristen’s first soccer game using iMovie. But I didn’t want to standardize on the Quicktime format so I went back to the PC for most of my video editing. I got along for quite some time with Microsoft MovieMaker. I actually liked MovieMaker a lot except for some annoying limitations like not being able to assign a transition between multiple clips in one step. I finally gave up on it when it kept crashing as I started working with longer videos (10 minutes) and adding music to them.
I tried Pinnacle’s video editing software and it was one of the worst pieces of software I’ve ever experienced. I tried a few others and finally settled on Adobe Premier Elements. I liked it okay. I thought it was too complicated but I figured out enough to get by. This past week it crapped out on me. It refuses to run. Even when starting with a new project containing no media, it apparently does something in the background and closes down after about 5 seconds with "Something serious has happened that requires the program to shut down". Searching for an answer I came across this which among other things wanted me to turn off all the startup items in Windows and selectivly turn one item on at a time until I determined if one was causing a conflict with Premier. Are you kidding me? Yeah I know that this COULD be the problem and this is they way one can figure out what is wrong but customers should NOT be asked to do this level of troubleshooting. I think first to blame is the underlining OS (Microsoft) and the fact there isn’t a better mechanism to prevent conflicts and then to REPORT them so we don’t have to run msconfig and take an hour or more to look for a needle in a haystack.
After upgrading, messing with msconfig, deleting various settings file I finally hit on something that worked which is to run it under a different user profile. I’m not going to login as a different person just so I can use a program that has become unstable in my profile. So I’m ready to give iMovie and the Mac a try. I never doubted that using iMovie would not be a pleasure. And now, after working at DVFilm I’m not so worried about using Quicktime as the output format for my videos.