bluefacedpixie

Flip Ultra (the world’s easiest video camera) + Apple MacBook Pro (very powerful laptop) + iMovie (consumer-oriented, well designed video software) + iDVD (ditto) = easy-to make home movies for Christmas.

Hell, no!

(repeat, LOUDER)

HELL, NO!

Admittedly I am using the ships-with-the-computer versions of iMovie and iDVD (iMovie 6 and iDVD ‘06 I believe) as opposed to the iLife ‘08 versions; but this is hardly an advert for spending money on Apple software.

To save me having to type lots of expletives, or Karima-level exclamation points, the answer is NO, F**K NO!. 72 hours in, still fighting.

One result:

grandvizier:~ gordon$ cat ~/scripts/every-x-do-y
#!/bin/bash

while true; do $2; sleep $1; done

grandvizier:~ gordon$ cat ~/scripts/kill-syslogd
#!/bin/sh
echo "sudo required"
sudo launchctl stop com.apple.syslogd
sudo rm -f /var/log/asl.* /var/log/system.log*
sudo launchctl start com.apple.syslogd

grandvizier:~ gordon$ sudo every-x-do-y 300 kill-syslogd


For the geeks amongst us, this is my sledgehammer to the discussions.apple.com solution for this problem (QT hates badly encoded movies and is coded by a three-year -old):

Dec 8 22:22:16 grandvizier [0x0-0x2d02d].com.apple.iDVD[326]: OQT_MovieImport: fseek_store: tried to seek to 7686744513496; outside of file

So, if you get a shiny disk with Lucy on it, and it actually works – it was made with blood and hours.