why? because Jimmy James is bored, and has lost all respect that I might have had for Wintel and x86 PeeCees, but I've got one here that I can try crappy software on, so I proudly present the first MES Software Review!
Jimmy James' Experiences With Technology That Sucks...
media player and all its related technology sucks ass. I tried to use Windows Movie Maker... the "new and improved" one and it was like trying to explain quantum physics to a deaf retarded infant chimpanzee. I might as well have been trying to build a perpetual motion machine.
Let me explain what I attempted to do...
I borrowed an allegedly peecee compatible DV camera that has both FireWire and USB 2 ports on it (really new thing, but supposedly supported by expee). I used Microsoft's most recent release of Windows Movie Maker on Windows XP SR1 running on a Hewlett Packard Pavilion with an AMD Athlon XP 1800+ with 512MB of RAM with a GeForce 3 64MB card, and a Western Digital 60GB 7200 RPM ATA 166 drive. It was compared against Apple iMovie 2 running on an iBook 600 with Mac OS X 10.2.3, 384MB of RAM, an ATI Rage 128 Mobility 8MB card, and a 30GB IBM Travelstar 5400RPM ATA100 drive.
I've got a question... how in the name of fuck do you import video? I've yet to see a pee cee that has non-sucky firewire... er, sorry... most peecees have the shitty "we're gonna half ass it" IEEE 1394, they do the bare minimum to get that "1394" certification. Apple uses the higher quality, 6-pin, bus powered FireWire... so they try as hard as they can to use the shitty stuff so that people won't compare them to Apple. If that happened, people might stand a chance of seeing how much wintel sucks. I will give HP credit where it's due, they used real 6-pin bus-powered FireWire, but for some reason the bus power wasn't enabled, and the camera never realized that it was plugged in. It worked fine on the iBook.
Yeah, so you can't import video, unless you wanna sit there for a week or twenty using Ultra Shitty Bus. I downloaded 30 minutes of video via USB. The HP's USB 2 ports failed to yield anything beyond USB speeds.
Now, assuming you've managed to get your crappy videos of your ugly yuppie kids into winblows movie mangler, you can start fucking them up! that's right, movie mangler now makes it easier than ever to not make good movies. The editing tools are a joke, and keep deciding FOR ME where I need to cut my video. I think I know pretty well where I want to cut clips, and don't need bill gates' diarrehal exhaust telling me what's best for my movie. iMovie, though, exhibited some inflexibility in choosing the length of still clips. I could select any time between 10 frames and 29 frames. from 0 to 9 frames though, it would sometimes want to round the length of the clip down to the lower second, for example, 2:20 was acceptable, 2:10 was as well, but 2:09 would round down to two even seconds. Very odd. Also, both apps need to explain that the number system 00:00:00: is minutes seconds frames, not hours minutes seconds. it can be confusing for noobs, and that's who MS wants to use their shitty software. iMovie at least makes some reference to the fact that they're frames.
Well, after I hacked up my porno of the neighbor's daugh... uh... I mean, the random shots of the freeway and squirrels and our boring orange cat, I tried exporting them.
Good thing movie mangler has a save command, cos you ain't never gonna get that damn thing out of the application. Every time I tried to export, I was greeted with my good friend, Mr. Blue Screen Of Death. iMovie exported to Cinepak, MPEG4, as well as DVD, DV, and even back out to the camera via FireWire.
Windows Movie Maker: Included with Windoze XP, also available in a new version from microsoft.com
iMovie 2: Included with Mac OS X, freely downloadable from apple.com.
iMovie 3: available in the iLife package, $49, Apple, freely downloadable from apple.com
[ February 10, 2003: Message edited by: Jimmy James: Mac Commando ]
