My Mac/video hobby

<title> My video hobby </title>
<center>
<h1>    My Mac/video hobby </h1>
</center>

I didn't want a Macintosh
and I didn't want to learn to edit video.
I got pushed into it
and then I found it lots of fun and I really like doing it!

<p>
I have made about four dozen short movies of family vacations
and semiprofessional topics.
My results please me immensely and I've gotten good
feedback from a few other people.
I've also had a few problems.
I'll just summarize my problems here.

<h3> Home-made DVDs unreliable</h3>
I've owned and had access to about 10 Macs in the last 5 years.
I've concluded (2007) that Mac-made DVD is a very unreliable archive
of family history.
About 50% of the DVDs I've made are not playable on other computers.
Consumer DVD players give better odds, but based on the discs I've
sent to 20 cousins,
I'd say 1/3 of all recipients are not able to play them all the way thru.
(tears)
I test every DVD I make on my own Sony home player.   Recently I took
one of these tested disks to a neighbor with a new Japanese DVD player
and we found it did not work.
Now (too late) I have learned to always make a tape backup.

<h3> Mac sucks!  </h3>
First problem with the Mac was
lack of manuals to explain the
the non-intuitive way
you need to deal with the external LaCie firewire hard drive.
Gone are the days where you need to cable
up before you power up,
and power up in a certain sequence.
You can power up and wire up in any sequence.
<p>
But there remains a giant Gotcha! that they don't tell you about.
Before you disconnect the firewire drive
you sure as heck better have dragged that FIREWIRE ICON into the trash
(meaning that you dismounted it).
I didn't.
The disk didn't come alive again.
Since I had it only one day, I returned it to the Apple Store.
Serves them right for not providing me a manual
to tell me that my unorthodox removing the disk cable
when I was finished with the disk (without dragging the icon
into the trash) would require some kind of disk first aid
if I was ever going to see my stuff again.
Lucky for me, I work at a place where lots of people can help.
They should tell you that you have a software problem,
not just simply ignore the existance of the firewire disk drive.
Actually, there is a combination of three buttons
but they don't like to tell anyone about it.
They like to pretend that Mac OS-X doesn't crash!  Dreamers or frauds?

<h3> Mac sucks again!  </h3>
They don't tell you how to shut down
when a disk starts to go into an infinite loop.
There should be a button for that.

<h3> Mac sucks again!  </h3>
Another thing I learned the hard way has to do with making movies.
You make huge files.
There will often be some disk difficulty with large files
connected to the Mac over the firewire.
Here is what you have to do:
Don't ask iMovie to make the files on a remote firewire disk.
Make the big files on the local disk.
Then let the Finder move the big file to the remote disk.
I believe the Finder is smarter than iMovie and is more ready
to deal with disk problems.


<h3> Mac rules!  </h3>
Actually, I like my Mac a lot and wouldn't trade it for anything else.
I just wrote Mac sucks in this web page so that it might be noticed
and indexed properly.