Apple is one of the most screwed up companies I've ever dealt with

[Jayn_Newell]

@Cardinal

OTOH, Window Movie Maker was a right pain, too. I imported all these videos, and it automatically cut them up into clips that had nothing to do with the scenes, and you couldn’t jump forward or backward except by these ~20 second clips, and it ONLY exports to .wmv, because it’s Microsoft, and God forbid they play nicely with others.

I’ve never heard anyone actually complain about the auto-clip feature in WMM. Hell, I kinda like it myself. But if it bothers you that much, it should be pretty trivial to re-combine them into one long clip. Just highlight them all, right click and there should be a combine option. Then cut it however you want and plop it on the timeline.

It should also have one or two options for non-.wmv encoding. DV-AVI comes to mind.Then you can recompress it to whatever codec you want. Theoretically. Unfortunately I can’t really help you on the application of that–I’m a Windows user, and the software I use for that isn’t avaliable on Macs.

One more thing I’d like to mention–DivX isn’t really a good editing codec, and different programs will play with it differently, some well, some not at all. It might be a good idea to convert to Lagarith or Huffy first. This will result in much larger files though, and not knowing how much disc space you have to spare I can’t say how good an option this is for you.

[newcrasher]

Back when I was a kid we had to watch our porn in cramped little booths with sticky floors. None of this “internets” where I can load nudie girls right on the screen at home. My quarter was always compatible.
Now get off my lawn!

[Cardinal]

@Sleel

If you have to change permissions to delete a file, ask yourself if you really should be doing it. The files have permissions to keep people from messing with things they aren’t meant to. If you delete an essential file, you could screw up the entire system. You should not delete a protected file unless you are absolutely sure you know what you’re doing, or unless you don’t really mind reinstalling your system from scratch.

No, what I want to do is delete Firefox and reinstall it, because for reasons no one can explain, it’s not allowing the use of the right mouse button on web links. The button works on everything else, even on mouse gestures. I figure if I export my bookmarks and then erase everything else of Firefox, I can delete whatever bad setting is doing this.

I used FfmpegX…
On preview: What program did you use to encode the Xvid files? Was that the player’s native export format? If so, then there was hardware conversion at work which is a lot faster than any software conversion.

Thanks for that link, I’ll look at it. The problem here is that it was never in a piece of hardware with me. These are episodes of a BBC show you can’t get over here at all. I’ve used BT to get them, and they are usually in Divx 5 or Xvid.

[Cardinal]

Ok, I have another question. When I try to edit on my buddy’s QT Pro, it seems that they’ve made it almost impossible to use. If you let the play head get to the point you want to cut at, you then have to grab the slider to put it at that point, and the play head moves to the slider, losing your cut point!!!

If anyone knows how to avoid this, please let me know. Also, is it possible to put more than one video end to end in QT Pro, so that you get them strung together, and you render them all at once into one file?

[gotpasswords]

@Cardinal

No, what I want to do is delete Firefox and reinstall it, because for reasons no one can explain, it’s not allowing the use of the right mouse button on web links. The button works on everything else, even on mouse gestures. I figure if I export my bookmarks and then erase everything else of Firefox, I can delete whatever bad setting is doing this.

You should be able to just grab the Firefox file from Applications and trash it. You are logged in as an administrator for the computer, right?

Failing that, find your way to where the preferences are stored, and trash firefox.pref. (i’m assuming it’s called that as I don’t use FF.) The next time you start FF, it should be back to defaults.

[neutron_star]

@Cardinal

Ok, I have another question. When I try to edit on my buddy’s QT Pro, it seems that they’ve made it almost impossible to use. If you let the play head get to the point you want to cut at, you then have to grab the slider to put it at that point, and the play head moves to the slider, losing your cut point!!!

I’ve never used QT Pro (or even a Mac for that matter), but this is a common problem when trying to edit highly-compressed video. You have to make your cuts on key frames. The key frame is an original image, while the frames following it reference the similarities between that frame and their own, rather than creating an entirely new image. This saves space.

Generally, the higher the compression level, the fewer key frames you have to work with. What your program is likely doing is sliding your selection over to the nearest key frame.

When dealing with DV, HuffyUV, or an uncompressed AVI, every frame is a key frame, allowing you to make cuts anywhere you want.

[Cardinal]

Since there seem to be a few people coming back to this thread, here is what I mean about loggin in: I cannot save even an .rtf file to my external drive because I don’t have permission. There is no login box to get this permission. No help or clue is given. I have no idea where to log in as administrator so I can do what I bought the dumb thing for.

Bill Gates may be a controlling geek with delusions of world domination, but that doesn’t mean that Jobs’ people have nailed this thing down entirely, either.

[Cardinal]

According to “Accounts”, I am the only account, and I am the administrator, which makes this all the more confusing.

[rjung]

@Sleel

Sorry Flip-4-Mac isn’t ported over yet.

I’m late to this mosh-fest, but I will note that Flip 4 Mac is universal. I got it here for my Intel-based iMac last month.

And yes, my new iMac did “just work.” Even the new Mac-video-enabled version of Skype, even though it’s ostensibly a “preview”, has been a reliable workhorse for me.

[rjung]

@Cardinal

I cannot save even an .rtf file to my external drive because I don’t have permission. There is no login box to get this permission. No help or clue is given.

Try this:

1. Find an icon for your external drive (either on the desktop, or in a Finder window).
2. Click it.
3. Press Apple-I, or choose the “Get Info” menu command.
4. Open the tab for “Permissions”
5. Change to give yourself read/write permissions on the external drive.
6. Close the Permissions window to save the changes.

And yeah, The Missing Manual is recommended, just because (a) all the Missing Manual books are useful, and (b) Dave Pogue is an entertaining writer.

[TimeWinder]

@rjung

And yes, my new iMac did “just work.” Even the new Mac-video-enabled version of Skype, even though it’s ostensibly a “preview”, has been a reliable workhorse for me.

Don’t upgrade. For some inexplicable reason, they tool the video out of later betas.

[The_Shroud]

@Cardinal

Since there seem to be a few people coming back to this thread, here is what I mean about loggin in: I cannot save even an .rtf file to my external drive because I don’t have permission.

This is a longshot, since I get the impression you’ve been able to write to this drive in the past, but was it formatted on a Windows system? Mac can read but not write to NTFS-formatted drives.

[Obsidian]

Clipping in QTPro: When you get your playhead to the spot you want to clip, double click on the bar right above. That will pull the nearest slider into position. Note that this may be the wrong slider, (the back instead of the front), so you want to make sure the slider you want is in the vicinity of your playhead.

Stringing QT files together is pretty easy. Open both files, make sure the playhead is at the very end of the first clip. Then use the sliders to select the entire second clip. Copy, then go back to your first file and then select “Add to Movie” from the Edit menu.

FWIW, my office abuses 20 Macs with heavy production work (of a graphic design/publishing nature. Video production is less common). Day in, day out, year round. I am, laughably, our Apple IT staff. I can’t speak for things “just working”-- we’ve had our share of issues. But they are stable as hell for what we do to them, and honestly more so than PCs runing the same software (such as Adobe CS2). Mac’s have never had the selection of free/cheap software for creative work that is available for Windows, but for Pro level work they are second to none. Final Cut and Motion have been enjoyable for me to work in.

Also: You have an intel Mini? How much memory? IIRC, video rendering leans heavy on the graphics card, and heavy on the RAM. The mini’s have integrated graphics and ship with a bare minimum of memory. It’s probably the worst system Apple currently makes (or has made in the last couple years) to edit video on. Apple tends to sharply divide consumer and pro aimed machines. It’s not that ALL Macs are better at graphics & video. The intel minis and MacBooks suck at it, for the above reasons. But a G5 or a MacPro is a whole different ball of wax. (I had the same bit of video for a project I was working on, no more than 5 minutes, with a lot of animation. It rendered in 1/2 hour on a pretty well loaded intel iMac. Our Quad G5, by comparison, took 3 minutes. I can believe it would take hours on a mini.) Design shops and production studios are businesses-- they wouldn’t invest in the equipment if it didn’t do the job.

[Jayrot]

Forget Quicktime. The king of all media players (on any platform) is VLC. Now that “just works”!

[rjung]

I’ll just add that editing in the Quicktime Player is a PITA; it’s like trying to do carpentry with plastic utensils. Playing stuff is fine, but for editing, get an application built for the job (I like iMovie, thankyouverymuch).

And definitely splurge on the RAM; anything less than 1 Gig is discomforting, IMO.

[Cardinal]

@Obsidian

Clipping in QTPro: When you get your playhead to the spot you want to clip, double click on the bar right above. That will pull the nearest slider into position. Note that this may be the wrong slider, (the back instead of the front), so you want to make sure the slider you want is in the vicinity of your playhead.

Stringing QT files together is pretty easy. Open both files, make sure the playhead is at the very end of the first clip. Then use the sliders to select the entire second clip. Copy, then go back to your first file and then select “Add to Movie” from the Edit menu.

THANK YOU. I’m off to work, but I will try all this. It sounds spot on.

This is a longshot, since I get the impression you’ve been able to write to this drive in the past, but was it formatted on a Windows system? Mac can read but not write to NTFS-formatted drives.

No, this is almost certainly the problem. So much for my inquiries about whether I would be able to save iMovie files to my external and then burn DVDs from that file on my Windows box. I was assured it was no problem.

I’m sorry to go on about this, but see what I mean? You have to pretty much fully commit to Apple-land, because it can’t interface with the other 96% of the computing world. I honestly think I may have to sell this Mini back on ebay before it depreciates even more.

[rjung]

Then why not just move your stuff off the external drive, then reformat it as FAT-32? You can use it with both Macs and Windows PCs that way, if you must.