I wanted to blog today.

I wanted to blog today. I really did. Wanted to do YouTube video too. However, my new SONY camcorder was a bit of a time-sink today. I spent several hours trying to figure out how to get video from the camcorder to my Mac. My friends and I will be performing as The Wiggles next weekend at Peter's birthday party, and I'd like to post some of the footage to YouTube ( I do all my YT stuff on the Mac ). The camcorder can record to either a memory card or a mini DVD, but ...

1) The Mac doesn't recognize the files on the memory card.
2) The Mac has a side-loading slot drive, so you can't put mini-DVDs into the DVD drive ( Well, I guess you could, but you'd never get it back ).
3) The camcorder doesn't have a firewire output port ( needed stream video to the Mac ). This is really odd, because the Sony camcorder I bought more than 5 years ago does have a firewire port.

( BTW, The Split Rock videos I posted a few weeks ago were shot using our Sony digital camera. The digital camera saves video in a format that the Mac can read. However, that won't help us next weekend, because the camera will be on photo duty during The Wiggles stuff. )

So after a lot of googling I've determined I'll need to get some more software and/or hardware to get these files from the camcorder to the Mac. However, I still haven't figured out exactly what I want to do, so I apologize in advance if it takes me a while to post The Wiggles videos.

We're thinking of recording next week with with both the old and new camcorder, so perhaps I'll use a firewire cable with the old camcorder to port footage from digital tape to the Mac. However, I haven't tried that before, and believe it or not ( despite the fact that I'm a computer programmer ), I'm actually rather lazy/inept when it comes to doing technical stuff with gadgets. I guess I'm more lazy that anything else. I don't like to use my brain to do techincal stuff unless I'm getting paid for it. That's why I got a Mac. It was supposed to make this kind of stuff plug-and-play easy. Oh well. Thing are never as easy as you might hope.

Anyway, hope to have a more interesting blog post in a few days.

Rich

EDIT: I just thought of another issue. We're going to be recording in HD ( we might as well get the nicest video possible for posterity ) with a 16:9 aspect ration. As far as I know, iMovieHD 6.0 ( The only movie maker I have on the Mac ) only handles a 4:3 aspect ration. Thus, I've got a bad feeling that if I try to port 16:9 video to iMovieHD, the video is going to be compressed in the horizontal direction. I'm not ready to change movie making software yet, so it might be a while before I post any of the HD footage of The Wiggles stuff. If I post anything soon, it will probably be 4:3 non-HD footage from my old camcorder.