Update: Video & Photo Editing (part 1)

I've been busy once again!  I wanted to get a few things accomplished today on the MBP, mainly to help me feel "justified" in my decision.  It's probably too early to make that call, but today went a long way.

I was quite eager to see how the video and photo capabilities would work.  In the end, all my photos and videos were successfully loaded to the desired location (which happened to be a network share on one of my PC's external drives). I was also able to successfully create a video with the stubborn kodak .MOV file format (encoded h.264) that my PC just couldn't do without crashing in multiple programs, giving me "out of memory errors",  or in one case, blue screening.

So the end result was great but the journey was a little tough.  I first tried using "Aperture" because it was the program that was set to default load whenever I plugged in a camera or video camera. I imported about 5GB of QT video and it seemed fine, but for the life of me I couldn't figure out how to get it "out" of Aperture and into the file system. It appeared to create one ginormous project file. I'll chalk it up to a learning experience- one that I wasn't interesting in learning at the time. So I did a quick google and found out that there is an Importer utility and that ended up working the best (for both photo's and video's)

After using the Importer utility I tried to directly copy the .MOV file to Final Cut Pro. It immediately gave me an error that it didn't support the funky format.  I was a little worried, so I tried the same thing in IMovie.  It let me pull it in no problem, though it spent some time converting it to the "proper" format. Once it did that I did a really simple test and stuck a couple of clips together. Worked great.  Then I tried loading in Final Cut Pro- it looks like it worked, though when I tried playing the clip it wasn't showing me anything in the preview window.  I'll chalk that up as a learning experience as well.  But as far as I can tell, everything is working great on the video front and I should be able to get things working how I want without error, freezes, or memory lockups!

Stay tuned for the next entry...