iMovie & iDVD Visual QuickStart Guide

Premiere Elements 9 for Mac Review

Adobe introduced Premiere Elements 9 for Mac, the first time the video editing application is available on the Mac. My review is now online at Macworld.com: Premiere Elements 9.

VHS Conversion Utilities Compared

Wondering what to do with those mouldering VHS tapes? Christopher Breen at Macworld compares the Roxio Easy VHS to DVD and the Elgato Video Capture: VHS capture tools compared.

iMovie '09 8.0.5 Released, Supports New iFrame Format

Apple today released iMovie '09 8.0.5. In addition to improving support for importing video captured using the latest iPod nano, this version introduces support for iFrame, a video format employing H.264 video and AAC audio compression.

According to Jim Dalrymple at CNET and Peter Cohen at The Loop, iFrame is a format developed by Apple. It's currently available on two cameras introduced by Sanyo this week: the Sanyo VPC-HD2000A and the Sanyo VPC-FH1A.

What's notable about iFrame is the capability to edit the footage natively in iMovie; footage recorded to memory or to hard disks using the widely-adopted AVCHD must first be transcoded to AIC (Apple Intermediate Codec) before editing. iFrame promises to reduce the time it takes to start editing and also reduce the amount of disk space used by the video. iMovie '09 8.0.5 also fixes an issue with resizing the application window during playback.

Windows Live Movie Maker Says Goodbye to the Timeline

iMovie '08 took a lot of flack for dispensing with the timeline, the single horizontally scrolling representation of a movie. Instead, your project is organized left to right, top to bottom like you read a paragraph of text.

Microsoft is taking the same approach with its new Windows Live Movie Maker. View the movie on this page to see an overview of the software.

iMovieLocationEditor review at Macworld

I gave iMovieLocationEditor four mice in my review at Macworld, which is now online. I wrote:

The new Map feature in iMovie ‘09 taps a database of 4,000 cities, airports, and other locations. If the location you want to use isn’t in that list, version 8.0.1 of the software added the capability to enter your own latitude and longitude coordinates. But what if you want to use the same custom location several times?

One option is to find the text file (WorldLocations.txt) that stores all of the locations and edit it manually. A better approach is to use Craig Stanton’s iMovieLocationEditor. The utility edits iMovie’s text file faster than you can say, “I can’t remember how to open an application package.”

Read the entire review here.

Recover Deleted Files from a Memory Card

Have you done the bone-headed thing I did recently? I erased a memory card in my camera, and then realized I hadn't transferred the latest photos to my computer. Fortunately, they're easy to recover as I write about in an article at TidBITS: Recover Erased Photos from a Memory Card (2009-06-03).

Although the article's focus is recovering still images, the same tools can recover video, too, which is especially helpful now that more cameras are recording directly to SD cards.

I look at four programs that can get the job done, each with their pluses and minuses: Data Rescue II, Klix, Photo Recovery for Mac, and Image Rescue.

Video Encoders Compared

Real World Video Compression looked at four Mac compression tools: El Gato's Turbo.264 1.3 hardware dongle and software, Apple's Compressor 3.0.3, Episode Pro 5.0.1, and Techspansion's Visual Hub 1.3.4 to see which performs best in terms of speed (not necessarily quality; all rendering was done with default settings).

The tests were run on a beefy Mac Pro and a slightly older MacBook Pro. The Turbo.264 fared the best thanks to its DSP (Digital Signal Processing) chip, but that was the case on both machines - indicating that you'd be just fine offloading some compression tasks to an older Mac and a Turbo.264, versus spending the money to buy a new, faster system.

(Hat tip to FreshDV.com.)

View AVCHD Thumbnails with HD Quick Look

I've mentioned VoltaicHD in the past as a way to process AVCHD footage without going through iMovie's or Final Cut's import process; those programs convert the footage to AIC (Apple Intermediate Codec) for editing. VoltaicHD allows you to copy the .mts files directly to your hard disk and perform the conversion on your own time. As a bonus, it brings AVCHD support to PowerPC-based Macs, since Apple's solutions require Intel-based machines. (See Import AVCHD Later with Voltaic.)

Justin at Shedworx wrote to me about a nifty utility they've concocted: HD Quick Look, a plug-in for Mac OS X Leopard that displays the first frame of an .mts file to give you a better idea of the clip's contents before converting it.

NYTimes on Tiny "HD" Camcorders

David Pogue's technology column this week reviews the Canon PowerShot TX1, the Sanyo Xacti VPC-HD2, and the (no-so-tiny) Panasonic HDC-SD1. Each captures high-definition video, but at varying qualities, and each stores the media on memory cards instead of tape.

Pogue's review, "Not-So-High- Definition Camcorders," is also full of some good one-liners, such as:

Each model has a flash for still photos, a tripod socket and a joystick the size of a hydrogen molecule.

and

If the Canon’s widescreen filming area were any smaller, you’d have to frame your shots by closing your eyes and imagining them.

Overall, the only one that gets any love is the Panasonic HDC-SD1, though it's dinged for poor-quality still photos and for recording in AVCHD format, which still isn't supported by many editing systems.

Mount Bottom-Loading Camcorder on a Tripod

FresHDV points to a company that makes accessories for mounting a bottom-loading camcorder onto a tripod so you can change tapes without having to remove the camera entirely:

One of the curses of cheap cost-effective “consumer” camcorders is the bottom-loading tape transport. It forces you to unscrew your tripod plate from the camera to swap tapes, which is a complete deal-breaker in some situations. For instance, long-form event shooting often requires multiple tape changes which renders these low-cost camcorders a lot less viable.

Fortunately, there are a number of accessories that can ease the pain of a bottom-loading camcorder. This company offers a number of shims and plate adapters for a wide variety of consumer camcorders that make it possible to load a tape without removing the camera from your tripod. And they are pretty reasonably priced too. Check ‘em out.