Still playing with some “How To” footage. Still hate iMovie. I don’t want you all to think I’m just sitting on my ass, so I’ll provide an update and then share some open mic love with you that I stumbled across in my experimentations. But first, let me give you the rundown on progress headaches in the editing world. Amy with the Boom and the Pow after the jump.

As my many two regular readers know, I’m trying to work with film editing. I ran into some issues with iMovie a while back, but I skipped telling you about one detail in that process. The biggest problem I’m having across the board is that my iMac G5 won’t recognize my analogue Sony digi 8 camera. Macs “just work” right out of the box, right? Right. So.

The workaround is to boot into XP and use the proprietary Sony app to import the footage onto my machine. The problem here is that I made the Windows partition pretty small when I created it, so I need to be able to access my external FW drives, which are Mac formatted. Because they are Mac formatted, Windows won’t see them. So I go and find MacDrive, and use that until the free trial expires. I got a lot of footage imported that way, but it’s in the shitty .AVI format.

Which my Mac can’t deal with.

Seriously, when I merely click on an AVI file, if I don’t attempt to open it right away, Finder crashes. WTF? So I install 3ivx as instructed. Still no love. Quicktime won’t play them, VLC will, but that still doesn’t help me with editing. iMovie won’t recognize them either. I keep getting a “wrong file type” error or something. So I need to convert the AVI files to a format my Mac can digest. I found iSquint, a free program that does just that. Works pretty good. Just takes a long time.

The biggest problem I have with this process, though, is that the quality of the footage is being degraded every time I treat it in some fashion. I want to be able to just pull it right from the camera an play with the original footage. To give you an example, the AVI clip that I used for the YouTube video you’ll see here in a bit was 642MB. The .mp4 clip was 47.4MB after conversion from AVI. I know that if I were working with footage streamed directly from the camera, I’d be up into the gigabyte range, so I’m a little pissed that I’m expending large amounts of time on what inevitably will be a film with less than perfect image quality.

So, I gained access to a professional quality film editing program. Granted, it’s an old version, but even when running FCP, the program won’t recognize my camera. I might be doing something wrong, too, and I have a call in to a director friend of mine that left me two voicemails explaining the less-than-intuitive way to capture footage into FCP. (Set four scratch discs, File–>Log and Capture. Log and Capture? But there’s an IMPORT option there too, why not just name it IMPORT and call it good? Sheesh.)

Until I get a little bit more guidance, I’m leaving it sit for a time while I work on other projects, which I’ll talk about later this week. If anyone has any guidance they can offer me, I’d love hearing about it. Let me know in the comments.

Now, though, it’s time to watch a little bit of open mic night. This footage was shot at Red’s Blue Goose Saloon in Gardiner, MT, 1999. The guy running sound was known as Shifty Brian, and Amy was dubbed Amy with the Boom and the Pow. I don’t remember her last name. She does a killer rendition of Hattie McDaneil’s 1929 song “Any Kind of Man Would be Better Than You”

…