[Jeff Carpenter]

I don’t now too much about this so I can’t tell you HOW to do it, but I know you can assign an automator action to a folder and it will run when the folder is modified. Look around in Automator’s help file, I know I’ve seen something about that in there.

[Jeff Carpenter]

Are you sure Flip4Mac installed? Try running the installer again. There shouldn’t be anything you have to do to make it work, so I’m wondering if it’s not actually there.

Also, it won’t really do AVIs, but get this and it might:

https://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/video/perian.html

I say “might” because there’s many different kinds of AVIs, but it should help with most of them.

[Jeff Carpenter]

I can’t say for certain in your case, Finn, but usually this kind of thing means that your computer is much faster than your hard drives. It can only work as fast as it’s given data.

I notice this on my Mac Pro too. The stuff I have on my internal SATA RAID renders faster than old projects I still have on firewire400 drives.

This has always been true, but we didn’t notice it as much when computers were slower. The faster the processors get, the more obvious this effect is.

[Jeff Carpenter]

I will say this…it took me (an experienced Final Cut user) about 2 hours to learn iMovie.

I really hated it for the first hour. Then, it got better.

I wanted to learn it for my home movie because I can use it to store them by time and assign keywords to them easier than I can in Final Cut. In other words, I’m using it a lot like iPhoto but for home movies.

It works very well for that, so I forced myself to learn it even though I wasn’t thrilled with it at first. But now that I understand how it “thinks” I’m much more comfortable with it. It really is quite fast for simple tasks. (You should see the scrubbing! Very responsive.)

So yes, I understand the pain of learning it. It wasn’t fun. But if it can do the job you need quickly and easily, it will be worth the time it took.

[Jeff Carpenter]

These are daily cuts, right? Maybe a title, some fades, and some simple trimming? Nothing fancy?

I would honestly suggest using iMovie. It should be able to copy the files over firewire and edit them as-is. It’s made to work with those types of formats. For travel I’d rather have something that works fast-and-easy rather than mess with software converting or cable adapters and whatnot.

When you get home you can export the videos from iMovie as quicktime files in whatever codec you desire. You can even save an XML file from iMovie and open up your rough-cut in Final Cut Pro.

And (I really like this) iMovie has an “upload-to-Youtube” feature right in the program.

Now, 2 things:

1) Take the camera to an Apple store if you can and TEST this out. I’ve never used that model and can’t say for sure it works with iMovie. Think so…but can’t be sure.

2) Play with iMovie! If you really hate it, find out now, rather than later.

iMovie has a button that switchs the “Events” window (like Final Cut’s import bin) with the “Projects” window (like Final Cut’s sequence timelines).

By switching them you put Events on top and Projects on bottom, which is more like Final Cut’s layout. Once you do that the program is a lot easier for a Final Cut editor to learn and understand.

As for laptops, get the Macbook for weight or the Macbook Pro for power. Pro is better but regular will get the job done.

[Jeff Carpenter]

Ok, took a look at it and you should try this IF he’s using iMovie ’08.

Select the project in iMovie and go to the “Share” menu. There’s an option to export a Final Cut XML file. You need to get that file and the folder where the iMovie assets are. You can right-click a video cip and have it show it to you in Finder. Move up a few levels until you find the master folder.

Import the XML file into a Final Cut project. It SHOULD know where to find the video clips, but if it doesn’t Final Cut should be able to re-link to them at that point.

[Jeff Carpenter]

What version?

Previous iMovies saved a project in a folder with all assets and projects in that folder. He should just send the entire folder.

iMovie ’08 now works more like iTunes. There are no projects. Think of the “iMovie Events” list as the same as the “iTunes Music Library” and think of “iMovie Projects” as “iTunes Playlists.”

There’s no opening or saving of files. Everything’s always loaded all the time. You just pick the project (playlist) you want to work on.

I’m not at my Mac right now, but I think there is a solution to your problem. Once I can look at it I can give a better answer.

[Jeff Carpenter]

Check the properties of the clip in the Motion tab. Double click the one in the timeline, NOT the one in the bin. Is the scale at 100% or something smaller?

If you captured the screen at full rez and it’s scaling it down to your video size, it may be that it’s being squeezed too much and that’s what’s causing the problem.

If you look in the Motion tab for the clip on the timeline and find that it’s set to something like 15% size then it might make sense to either blow it up larger (thus losing the edges of the screen) or try to re-record it with the screen set to 800×600 so that it doesn’t have to be re-sized as much by Final Cut.

[Jeff Carpenter]

The other problem with rules for this is that they wouldn’t take subject matter into account.

The music under a VO about snowboarding is going to be much closer to the dialog than it would be for someone talking about suicide prevention.

It has to be a judgement call on your part.

[Jeff Carpenter]

Is it possible to find out and tell us the model numbers for all 4 cameras?

And what the final delivery method will be? (DVD? Web?)

We can tell you all sorts of assumptions, but that does you no good if they prove to be wrong.