03.30.08
Posted in Home at 8:47 pm by JohnB
I took it upon myself to take video at a recent event (Golden Wedding Anniversary!). This was for a couple of reasons.. firstly I thought it’d be nice thing to do, and secondly my memory is shot to pieces these days and I’ve decided that I need to capture as much as possible! 
I resolved to use iMovie to build up the little bit and pieces of footage along with a speech given bu one of the guests with some photo’s overlayed at salient points to assist with visualisation of the life of the happy (still) couple. It was this exercise where iMovie first let me down. Yes, it’s possible to drop a still image over the top of a video clip, but only one any others need to go into a different section.. hmmm OK thinks I, lets split the video into section whereby I can add a singe still image to each.. that’ll work! YAY it does… BOO! It all works until I accidentally drop the wrong still on, I remove the offending still from the sequence and add the correct one, but now the overlay simply doesn’t work. This is bad karma and I was not impressed!
I resolved to find a solution elsewhere for this bit and built up the rest of the sequence in iMovie without any issues. Straight cut’s, transitions and music overlays are not a problem…, well actually the music bit WAS a pain in the rump until some lateral thinking squared the circle. You see if you add more the one background track to a peice (the movie is over 3.5 minutes see) it butt’s them up against each other, now your thinking ‘What’s the problem?’, well I acutall want an airgap in between the peices (I had an up-beat Nat King Cole number for the start and the Anniversary Waltz at the end) so that the speech wasn’t audio-hindered. I had assumed the I should be able to re-position the music to suit, but no. My solution was to take another sound clip (actually a podcast) insert it into the sequence at the point I wanted the speech to sit (when I eventually got it done elsewhere) and set the volume to zero! It’s not pretty but it works.
Now, my speech sequence was going to have to be done outside of iMovie. A situation which initially narked me somewhat but I’ve now rationalised almost completely and I’ll come to that at the end of this missive! I decided to use Final Cut Express 4 and picked up a copy – it felt like home! There was my timeline, there was my preview window, there were my multiple video and audio tracks I felt GOOD!
There was an initial glitch whereby I couldn’t actually view my work because I got an “Unrendered” notice on a pretty blue screen when I hit play.. this annoyed me until a little Google-based research led me to the RT settings, once this was changed to ‘Unlimited’ I was home free! Stills were inserted, cross-fades put in place and the job was done. I simply took my outputted movie and dropped it back into iMovie in the right spot. BINGO!
iDVD gave me a fantastic finished look and 2 burns later (I mistakenly did the first in widescreen format not 4:3) the finished DVD was ready and was very well received after lunch today!
So, my rationalisation here is this:-
iMovie is an immensely powerful consumer sequencing tool. Usable with almost no problems by anyone with a video camera and a Mac.In these circumstances it’s without parallel. It certainly knocks chunks out of anything I’ve paid good money for in the past on the PC. And it’s free! (well OK it’s part of the iLife 08 suite which carries a nominal charge if you don’t have it, but it came free with MY new Mac!)
Final Cut Express 4 is a video editing package for people who want to edit their videos, not just sequence them up with some cool tunes.
Once I’d made this distinction in my head it all made sense! iMovie is like iPhoto… it allows you to do anything you’d want to day to day, but for heavy duty stuff it’s not the right tool, nor does it pretend to be! for me the relation ship is this, iMovie is to Final Cut, what iPhoto is to Photoshop.
If I do more with video and need more poke, I’d have no problems with buying the full-on Final Cut Studio product set and it won’t make me think any less of the Express version. They’re simply tools to do a particular job.
- J.
Permalink
03.28.08
Posted in Home at 11:53 am by JohnB
For long enough now I’ve been ‘making do’ here at Silesti.net. There’s been a problem with sending email from the system which I couldn’t really pin down but to be honest it wasn’t really giving me too much grief so I’d kind-of put it on the back burner!
But then I noticed that a few folks had signed up to leave coments and, of course, they wouldn’t be getting their confirmations or anything through so I thought I ought to sort things out.
To my rescue came the Swift SMTP Plugin, if you’re having problems with email and have access to an SMTP server (I’ll bet you do!) then I’d recommend it totally!
Configuration is easy-peasy and the test function works a treat. Happiness is a functional email system!
- J.
Permalink
03.07.08
Posted in Home, Work at 12:20 pm by JohnB
I wanted to share this with you as it really hacked me off that I couldn’t find a good reason for things to be acting the way they were!
I was creating a new Windows Live ID for my girl using one of my own domains, and was getting the error
“ The portion of your e-mail address that follows the @ symbol is part of a “reserved domain” such as live.com, hotmail.com, msn.com or passport.com. Please type a different e-mail address. ”
Now this got me initially confused, but then really annoyed. After all it’s my domain, why should Live tell me that I can’t use it?!
I did the usual Googleing of the error and discovered not a solution, but a raft of others seeing the same problems. Admittedly most of these folks were trying to use Gmail or Verizon email addresses but there were a few trying to use their own domains the same as I was, along with what seems to be the standard response form the Live support team of “You can always sign up with a Hotmail or Live email address”! This, as a few others pointed out, is no real answer as what a lot of folks want to do (me included) is to reduce the number of different email accounts we have in place to a more manageable level.
But I was not going to let this this beat me. What is a reserved domain? What can I do to use my domain for Live ID’s? How is this Live thing all supposed to work anyway?? – Oh as an aside here.. if you try to get a new Live ID from www.live.com they only give you a choice of their domains. If you want to use your own email address use the “Sign up” option from the MSN sign-in page.
The resolution – It worked for me, it might work for you!
I already had a Live ID on my domain so I logged into that and went to my account page to see if there was anything in there that would let me ‘switch on’ the ability for other IDs to be created, there wasn’t anything obvious.. Child Accounts are simply that.. accounts for children, not what I wanted.
But in the Settings section there is an innocuous link entitled “Administration Center” I clicked on this and was informed that this is the new name for the previous Live Domains product – the idea being that you effectively re-sell Live-based email addresses which appear to be on your domain – Hmmm I thought, perhaps… yes we’ll give this a go. I filled in the confirmation process, added a CNAME to my DNS zone file (this proves you own the domain I guess) and was then presented with an admin screen where I could add new accounts to my domain. Following the tenuous logic and taking a leap of faith I did just that and whaddya know! It created a new Live ID for the new account on my domain YAY!
The new account was able to log in to Live, log in to MSN Messenger (the whole point of the exercise) and everything works.
So… the bottom line here is that if you own your domain and are getting the “Reserved domain” message when you try to add a new ID, dig dig dig into your existing Live account service settings and you should be able to get what you need.
Why this has to be quite so complicated I’m not sure. Why the support folks are not able to identify what needs to be done, again is unclear to me. Why I can’t access my Live account from my MSN page <shrugs> beggars belief, but these things are truisms and that’s it.
I’m sorry this isn’t going to help those with Gmail or Verizon or other generic ISP email addresses, but I guess that Microsoft’s point here.. “Don’t use their generic email system, use ours!”. I know not everyone wants to have the cost and admin overhead of having their own domain, but I’ll bet if you shop around there are some pretty easy places where you could get one with a nice control panel to manage it through, I use Daily.co.uk for mine.
Hope this provides a little insight for some, and that the hoops we have to jump through are seen by Microsoft/Live/MSN as hurdles to the levels of service adoption they seek.
- J.
Permalink
