My latest experiment with the Mac has been with videos. I have a lot of video clips of my son that I've taken with my FlipVideo Ultra digital camcorder. I created two DVDs on my Windows PC that are essentially all of the clips strung together one right after another with a basic menu system. It's basic and utilitarian, but with no production value whatsoever. So I thought that I'd start playing around to see what the Mac can do, since this is what seems to set the Macs apart from the WinPCs.
I started by firing up iDVD, and the first thing I noticed is that the level of themes was quite a few notches above what I had available in Windows. Even though these would be out-of-the-box productions, they would still be pretty impressive. I then proceeded to drag in movie clips with reckless abandon to see what would happen. Whereas my Win DVDs would just play clip after clip without stopping, the iDVD build would return to the menu immediately after playing one clip instead of continuing on to the next one. Apparently this is because each movie is treated as a separate "title", so like when you put in an Iron Man DVD, it plays the movie "title", and when it's done, it returns you to the menu. As it turns out, what I was wanting was for the individual clips to be treated as "chapters". This is where iMovie comes in.
With iMovie, you basically edit together all of your video clips into a single movie. You can add transitions from clip to clip, on-screen titles, title overlays, and even throw in a soundtrack if you like. It also allows you to insert Chapter points as well as name them, which is really handy as I will describe later.
Now the problem that I had with iMovie was that it would not recognize the FlipVideo AVI files, even though they played just fine in QuickTime Player. The FlipVideo uses the 3ivx codec, but from what I've read, it uses a modified version of the codec, which would explain why QT can play the files but iMovie can't import them. I decided not to install the FlipVideo version of the codec because as you'll recall from my previous post, it caused problems with other video playback. So what to do?
Behold HandBrake, a video conversion utility. Using HandBrake, I converted all of the video files into MPEG4 videos using the h.264 codec, which should make iMovie happy. The interesting thing is that the first time I converted a file for testing, it gave the file a .mp4 extension, which iMovie found without any problem. The next time I converted a file, iMovie wouldn't import it, because it had a .m4v extension, which is apparently what iTunes likes. I changed the extension to .mp4, and iMovie found it just fine. So as I converted all of my files, I had to make sure to change the extension to .mp4 in order for iMovie to see them.
The other quirk about HandBrake is that it automatically crops your videos, which is not really what I wanted. So another thing I had to watch was to make sure the output file was also 640x480. If not, then I had to go into the Picture properties, change the cropping to custom, and zero out all the values.
Having done all this, I finally had all of my video clips converted to .mp4 and imported into iMovie. Looking back on it, I probably should have converted them at 100% quality to minimize any degradation due to compression, but so far the clips seem to be perfectly fine. If anything, some of the grainier clips seem to be smoother after the conversion. I would like to think there's some way to set the defaults, but I haven't taken the time to track it down.
So back to iMovie. The final element of having converted all of the video clips is that they do not have the actual date and time stamp for the videos. Fortunately, iMovie allows you to change these so that they appear in order of when they were recorded. Yes, this is all tedious, and yes, I would prefer not to have to do it, but that would involve installing the FlipVideo 3ivx codec. I may do some additional testing in the future. Either that, or I'll use it as an excuse to upgrade to an HD camera like the MinoHD or the Kodak Zx1, but I need to do more research on those and what codecs they use. While I like the FlipVideo Ultra's overall performance, the codec issue does make this whole process more tedious. (Okay, so now I'm installing the current FlipVideo 3ivx codec, are you happy?)
I'm not going to bore you with what I did within iMovie, but suffice it to say that it a) is fairly intuitive, b) looks VERY professional, and c) pretty easy to use. I even built a decent facsimile of the Star Wars opening titles using the Far Far Away title template. How could I not? As soon as I saw that template, I knew I was going there, and you know you would, too. So having completed my movie, complete with titles, transitions, and chapters, I told it to share the movie to iDVD, and it started rendering. About 3 hours later, it arrived in iDVD, where I applied a DVD theme and found my movie, scene selection submenus, and everything ready to go. I edited some of the chapter titles so they would fit onscreen, and saved the project to a DVD image, which took about 2 hours to encode.
I mounted the DVD image and launched DVD Player, and I was very disappointed to find that the title text was EXTREMELY pixelated. Imagine playing a modern video game at full 1980x1200 resolution only to find the in-game text to resemble that of the Atari 2600 console instead. Back to Google! From what I read and assuming I understood everything that I read, what happens is that when iMovie shares to iDVD, it will render and encode everything for DVD, which then happens again when iDVD preps the image. The recommended method is to save the movie using the Export Movie command, which saves it as a .m4v file. Then open iDVD and drag that .m4v file into iDVD.
I created a test movie, dragged it into iDVD, and it automatically created all the same movie and scene selection menu items and submenus just like when I shared directly from iMovie to iDVD. Next, I saved the project to a DVD image, and when I opened the new image in DVD Player, all the title text looked significantly better.
Now that I have the FlipVideo 3ivx codec installed, it's time to go see if iMovie can use the FlipVideo files directly. That would certainly save a lot of time.
Saturday, April 18, 2009
The Great Migration
I was originally planning on doing a single "catch up" post, but I decided to break it up a bit since it's all going to be pretty lengthy as it is.
So now that we've made the full scale jump into Appleland, it was time to migrate data and secure it. At this point, all of my data was scattered about on the Windows PC's attached drives, complete with questionable Windows backup files and recovered restorations. I took the primary attached drive and connected it to the USB port. Not surprisingly, the iMac recognized it immediately and mounted it. I thought I'd just grab my data at the top-most folder and simply drag it to my Documents folder and see how it played out. Not surprisingly, it did encounter an issue with one of the files. I'm not sure what kicked out the process, but a quick search on the error message introduced me to the "cp -R" console command. Using this command with a quick drag of the source and destination folders to the console window, I was then able to copy all the data files without any problem. I didn't time how long it took, but it didn't matter since I went to bed. So repeat this process for my 4 other drives, and I soon had all of my critical data on the iMac's internal hard drive.
The next item on the agenda was to get all of my email out of Microsoft Outlook 2007 and into Apple Mail. I had read online that this was no minor feat considering that even Microsoft Entourage for the Mac could not read Microsoft's own .pst files. Attempts to export/import using other mail apps like Mozilla Thunderbird produced spotty results, i.e. some messages converted fine while others did not with nothing to indicate why. I then came across a few posts about a product called O2M by a company called Little Machines (http://www.littlemachines.com). For $10, this little application was supposed to be the answer to all my email migration problems. I downloaded the application, which comes as crippleware until you register it, and proceeded to test its capabilities. The first thing I did was I opened Microsoft Outlook 2007, created a test folder, and copied 5 messages that Mozilla Thunderbird missed. Then I launched O2M's demo (which by no mere coincidence is limited to converting 5 messages) and pointed it at my test folder. I then imported the newly created mbox file into Apple Mail, and there were all 5 test messages. A few minutes later, Little Machines had my $10, and I was well on my way to converting all of my emails, contacts, and even my schedule appointments. This little application was truly a lifesaver since I was able to use it to convert all of my wife's emails, contacts, and schedule appointments as well.
I now have Apple Mail set up on the MacBooks and the iMac so that emails are left on the server until they are moved out of the Inbox. The iMac is the primary workstation, so if any emails are going to be saved, they'll be saved here where Time Machine will backup the data. Unfortunately, I cannot get Apple Mail to interact fully with Hotmail, which has been my primary mail account for the last 10 years. Unlike Gmail, Hotmail does not allow Apple Mail to access it using IMAP, and its POP3 configuration only allows it to read messages. Any deletions or message movements appear to work until you Get Mail, and then all those pesky messages show up again. So it may be time to say "Sayonara" to Hotmail and replace it with Gmail as my primary online mail address.
Now that I had all of my critical data on the iMac, it was time to protect it. With that in mind, I decided to buy an attached drive which would solely be used for Time Machine backups. To save you some reading, I'll break it down like this. I considered a Seagate 1.5TB FW400 drive, a WD 1TB MyBook FW400 drive, and a WD 1TB MyBook FW800. Again, I consulted my Apple buddy, and I ended up with the WD 1TB FW800 drive, which only cost me about $20 more than the FW400 version. While the 1.5TB would have been nice, I think the performance is a worthy trade off.
With drive in hand, I headed home, plugged it in, answered Time Machines questions regarding the drive, and sent it on its merry way to backing up my hard drive. It completed the entire initial backup of about 300GB of data in approximately 3 hours. FW800 ftw!
Now that I had Time Machine backups of this data, I was able to begin freeing up space on the attached drives, since I no longer required them as a backup.
All that remained now was to consolidate my non-essential files using the attached drives. Since these files tended to change quite frequently, I didn't want them clogging up my Time Machine backup, so I decided to keep them on the attached drives. After about a day of data file Tetris, I finally had things consolidated onto two 500GB drives. At one point, it was very tempting to simply go out and purchase a second WD 1TB Mybook, but I'm glad I didn't, since I have the storage already. It would be nice, though, if these drive enclosures had at least FW400.
The final piece to the hardware puzzle was getting my Canon MP960 multifunction connected and working on the iMac. I downloaded the printer and scanner drivers, and the MP Navigation and EZ-Print utilities from the Canon website, installed them, plugged in the MP960, and just like that, I was back in business. One thing that I was surprised to find was that using the scan function, I was able to save multiple scanned documents into a single multi-page PDF. In all honesty, this function may have been available in Windows, but I do not remember seeing it as an option when I scanned files previously, and it is a feature for which I had looked, too.
So here I am, fully migrated to the iMac, and so far everything is working beautifully. I was even able to open and read some Word 2007 documents in OpenOffice.org 3.0.1. Not too shabby.
So now that we've made the full scale jump into Appleland, it was time to migrate data and secure it. At this point, all of my data was scattered about on the Windows PC's attached drives, complete with questionable Windows backup files and recovered restorations. I took the primary attached drive and connected it to the USB port. Not surprisingly, the iMac recognized it immediately and mounted it. I thought I'd just grab my data at the top-most folder and simply drag it to my Documents folder and see how it played out. Not surprisingly, it did encounter an issue with one of the files. I'm not sure what kicked out the process, but a quick search on the error message introduced me to the "cp -R" console command. Using this command with a quick drag of the source and destination folders to the console window, I was then able to copy all the data files without any problem. I didn't time how long it took, but it didn't matter since I went to bed. So repeat this process for my 4 other drives, and I soon had all of my critical data on the iMac's internal hard drive.
The next item on the agenda was to get all of my email out of Microsoft Outlook 2007 and into Apple Mail. I had read online that this was no minor feat considering that even Microsoft Entourage for the Mac could not read Microsoft's own .pst files. Attempts to export/import using other mail apps like Mozilla Thunderbird produced spotty results, i.e. some messages converted fine while others did not with nothing to indicate why. I then came across a few posts about a product called O2M by a company called Little Machines (http://www.littlemachines.com). For $10, this little application was supposed to be the answer to all my email migration problems. I downloaded the application, which comes as crippleware until you register it, and proceeded to test its capabilities. The first thing I did was I opened Microsoft Outlook 2007, created a test folder, and copied 5 messages that Mozilla Thunderbird missed. Then I launched O2M's demo (which by no mere coincidence is limited to converting 5 messages) and pointed it at my test folder. I then imported the newly created mbox file into Apple Mail, and there were all 5 test messages. A few minutes later, Little Machines had my $10, and I was well on my way to converting all of my emails, contacts, and even my schedule appointments. This little application was truly a lifesaver since I was able to use it to convert all of my wife's emails, contacts, and schedule appointments as well.
I now have Apple Mail set up on the MacBooks and the iMac so that emails are left on the server until they are moved out of the Inbox. The iMac is the primary workstation, so if any emails are going to be saved, they'll be saved here where Time Machine will backup the data. Unfortunately, I cannot get Apple Mail to interact fully with Hotmail, which has been my primary mail account for the last 10 years. Unlike Gmail, Hotmail does not allow Apple Mail to access it using IMAP, and its POP3 configuration only allows it to read messages. Any deletions or message movements appear to work until you Get Mail, and then all those pesky messages show up again. So it may be time to say "Sayonara" to Hotmail and replace it with Gmail as my primary online mail address.
Now that I had all of my critical data on the iMac, it was time to protect it. With that in mind, I decided to buy an attached drive which would solely be used for Time Machine backups. To save you some reading, I'll break it down like this. I considered a Seagate 1.5TB FW400 drive, a WD 1TB MyBook FW400 drive, and a WD 1TB MyBook FW800. Again, I consulted my Apple buddy, and I ended up with the WD 1TB FW800 drive, which only cost me about $20 more than the FW400 version. While the 1.5TB would have been nice, I think the performance is a worthy trade off.
With drive in hand, I headed home, plugged it in, answered Time Machines questions regarding the drive, and sent it on its merry way to backing up my hard drive. It completed the entire initial backup of about 300GB of data in approximately 3 hours. FW800 ftw!
Now that I had Time Machine backups of this data, I was able to begin freeing up space on the attached drives, since I no longer required them as a backup.
All that remained now was to consolidate my non-essential files using the attached drives. Since these files tended to change quite frequently, I didn't want them clogging up my Time Machine backup, so I decided to keep them on the attached drives. After about a day of data file Tetris, I finally had things consolidated onto two 500GB drives. At one point, it was very tempting to simply go out and purchase a second WD 1TB Mybook, but I'm glad I didn't, since I have the storage already. It would be nice, though, if these drive enclosures had at least FW400.
The final piece to the hardware puzzle was getting my Canon MP960 multifunction connected and working on the iMac. I downloaded the printer and scanner drivers, and the MP Navigation and EZ-Print utilities from the Canon website, installed them, plugged in the MP960, and just like that, I was back in business. One thing that I was surprised to find was that using the scan function, I was able to save multiple scanned documents into a single multi-page PDF. In all honesty, this function may have been available in Windows, but I do not remember seeing it as an option when I scanned files previously, and it is a feature for which I had looked, too.
So here I am, fully migrated to the iMac, and so far everything is working beautifully. I was even able to open and read some Word 2007 documents in OpenOffice.org 3.0.1. Not too shabby.
Apple? More like Rabbits!
Okay, it's been a while since my last update, and the landscape around here has changed appreciably. My wonderful wife was able to find a buyer for the Dell XPS laptop, and we were due a refund on our taxes. These two numbers coincidentally added up to a number that just about covered the cost of an iMac. So what was I to do? My Windows PC was still acting up even after rebuilding it using Vista, which is another saga in and of itself. Suffice it to say that it pushed me over the edge. So I decided to pull the trigger on a 24" iMac.
Since I had decided on the 3.06GHz model, the only decision was which graphics card. I'm typically an nVidia faithful, but the info on the Apple website showed the ATI Radeon HD 4850 as being appreciably faster. Unfortunately, the ATI option changed the ship time from 1-3 days to 3-6 weeks. Yes, weeks. After considerable Googling, I found that the reason for the delay was either that ATI could not meet its production commitments, or the drivers wouldn't be available until the Leopard 10.5.7 update was released later this year. So since nVidia was able to get its products delivered, I decided to go with the nVidia GT130. Besides, it scratched the Immediate Gratification itch as well without sacrificing much.
Shortly after placing the order, my wife was talking about how she thought it would be nice if we could have two workstations in the office so that we could both work on a computer. I pointed out that the likelihood of us overlapping like that was probably fairly low, and as such, it was hard to justify purchasing another iMac. If anything, I thought that maybe it would make more sense to have another MacBook in basic trim since most of the secondary work would probably consist of checking emails, surfing the web, or word processing/spreadsheets. At any rate, we decided to table the discussion since there wasn't really a pressing need.
The next day, my wife announced that she had thought about it, and she agreed that the path forward should be another MacBook instead of another iMac. In another coincidence, I received an email from MicroCenter announcing their Mac Month specials, which included a $200 rebate on the basic trim white MacBook. I stared long and hard at that advertisement just to make sure my eyes were not deceiving me. I even had my friend at Apple look at it, and she confirmed that it was the 2009 model white MacBook with the nVidia chipset. Much to my surprise, my wife quickly authorized procurement.
And just like that, our household is now an Apple household. The best part of it all is that thanks to the medical flexible spending account, selling the Dell XPS laptop, and the income tax refund, we only had to spend out-of-pocket on the latest MacBook.
So yeah, like the title says: Apple? More like Rabbits!
Since I had decided on the 3.06GHz model, the only decision was which graphics card. I'm typically an nVidia faithful, but the info on the Apple website showed the ATI Radeon HD 4850 as being appreciably faster. Unfortunately, the ATI option changed the ship time from 1-3 days to 3-6 weeks. Yes, weeks. After considerable Googling, I found that the reason for the delay was either that ATI could not meet its production commitments, or the drivers wouldn't be available until the Leopard 10.5.7 update was released later this year. So since nVidia was able to get its products delivered, I decided to go with the nVidia GT130. Besides, it scratched the Immediate Gratification itch as well without sacrificing much.
Shortly after placing the order, my wife was talking about how she thought it would be nice if we could have two workstations in the office so that we could both work on a computer. I pointed out that the likelihood of us overlapping like that was probably fairly low, and as such, it was hard to justify purchasing another iMac. If anything, I thought that maybe it would make more sense to have another MacBook in basic trim since most of the secondary work would probably consist of checking emails, surfing the web, or word processing/spreadsheets. At any rate, we decided to table the discussion since there wasn't really a pressing need.
The next day, my wife announced that she had thought about it, and she agreed that the path forward should be another MacBook instead of another iMac. In another coincidence, I received an email from MicroCenter announcing their Mac Month specials, which included a $200 rebate on the basic trim white MacBook. I stared long and hard at that advertisement just to make sure my eyes were not deceiving me. I even had my friend at Apple look at it, and she confirmed that it was the 2009 model white MacBook with the nVidia chipset. Much to my surprise, my wife quickly authorized procurement.
And just like that, our household is now an Apple household. The best part of it all is that thanks to the medical flexible spending account, selling the Dell XPS laptop, and the income tax refund, we only had to spend out-of-pocket on the latest MacBook.
So yeah, like the title says: Apple? More like Rabbits!
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