No, not ones we've gone to see lately (although, we do highly recommend the new Sherlock Holmes and latest Mission Impossible flicks). I mean home movies.For Christmas, Mr. Perfect desperately wanted a really good table saw and compound miter saw. We found them on sale for an amazing price (Black Friday shopping at its best; there were only four people in line ahead of us at the Lowe's at 4:30 am, with the doors opening at 5:00). However, that left us with a little bit of a dilemma of what to give poor, neglected Most Happy Girl (yeah, right; so neglected). While perusing the Thanksgiving ads for Black Friday, we found the perfect gift for the girl who loves taking pictures and watching movies: a Panasonic fully-HD camcorder.
It was the right price. It had enough bells and whistle to keep her happy for a good two or three years before needing an upgrade. After the slight, non-craziness of Lowe's and Big 5 (as stated before, no big lines at either store), the line for the Costco opening was a little daunting, but most of the other people wanted the T.V.s. Hurrah for our side!
As you can see from various previous posts, we've been having some great fun with the camera. However, there was one thing we hadn't fully researched before making the purchase, and that was to see how compatible the file format is with a Mac. You see, I'm a Mac girl. I love me my MacBook Pro. In fact, we've all become so Mac happy, we know that our next home computer purchase is going to take about three years of saving up to get. Ah, the joys of technology. Well, we discovered that the software that comes with this particular camcorder isn't compatible with a Mac. What to do, what to do?
Now, anyone who knows anything about Macs knows that they come with movie making software. It's part of the big sell for Macs. They have this software called iDVD that lets you burn DVDs of homemade movies with menus and separated chapters and all that fun stuff. However, to transfer the images from the camcorder format to a format iDVD recognizes would mean upgrading the iMovie that came with iLife '09 to iMovie '11. So, we bit the bullet, bought the software upgrade (I think it was a whopping $15.00), and have now successfully made a DVD of the first half of the Broadway Review/Melodrama evening, complete with chapters for each song and an Extras menu that has Drama Queen's big song (see the Hakuna Matata post).So, I'm now lovin' me some iMovie. To get both halves of the evening on one DVD, I'll need to lay my hands on some dual layer format DVDs, but they are already on their way to my home. In face, they should arrive today. I'm a happy, happy girl.
Happy reading, my little pupils!
No comments:
Post a Comment