I

Importing Video from a FireWire Camcorder to an Aluminum MacBook

(Also posted at TidBITS.) Apple’s newest consumer laptop is a package full of shiny power, but it also lacks a FireWire port. That means no FireWire Target Disk Mode, no support for external hard drives with FireWire interfaces, and no support for digital camcorders that have FireWire (or i.Link) ports. In an email response to ...

F

Five Hot New Features in Photoshop Elements 7 for Windows

Adobe announced Photoshop Elements 7 for Windows this week, and since I’m deep into working on the update to my Photoshop Elements Visual QuickStart Guide, I wrote an article for the Peachpit Web site about what’s new in Elements 7: Five Hot New Features in Photoshop Elements 7 for Windows. I talk about the integration ...

V

Video Encoders Compared

Real World Video Compression looked at four Mac compression tools: El Gato’s Turbo.264 1.3 hardware dongle and software, Apple’s Compressor 3.0.3, Episode Pro 5.0.1, and Techspansion’s Visual Hub 1.3.4 to see which performs best in terms of speed (not necessarily quality; all rendering was done with default settings). The tests were run on a beefy ...

V

View AVCHD Thumbnails with HD Quick Look

I’ve mentioned VoltaicHD in the past as a way to process AVCHD footage without going through iMovie’s or Final Cut’s import process; those programs convert the footage to AIC (Apple Intermediate Codec) for editing. VoltaicHD allows you to copy the .mts files directly to your hard disk and perform the conversion on your own time. ...

Q

QuickTime 7.5 Addresses Security Concerns, iMovie and iDVD Updated

While the iPhone 3G and Snow Leopard grabbed everyone’s attention this week, Apple also released security and bug-fix updates to QuickTime, iMovie ’08, and iDVD ’08. QuickTime 7.5 tackles several security issues dealing with maliciously crafted media: PICT images, AAC-encoded media, and Indeo video. It also changes the behavior of handling URLs by revealing files ...

S

Spring

It’s now been over three months since my daughter was born, and I’m only now starting to feel like things are stabilizing. Not that she knocked anything out of whack, per se, but that everything is just different enough that I haven’t done some things – like update this blog. (I’ve been blogging about Ellie, ...

O

Other Recent Projects: New Books!

As you can imagine, I’ve been pretty focused on becoming a dad lately, but that doesn’t mean it’s occupied all of my attention (just most of it). I’ve been hard at work on a number of other projects. Just prior to my daughter’s birth, I wrapped up Photoshop Elements 6: Visual QuickStart Guide, my book ...

N

New Books!

As you can imagine, I’ve been pretty focused on becoming a dad lately, but that doesn’t mean it’s occupied all of my attention (just most of it). Just prior to my daughter’s birth, I wrapped up Photoshop Elements 6: Visual QuickStart Guide, my book that covers the latest version of Adobe’s consumer image organizing and ...

P

Profile of Stumptown Founder Duane Sorenson

The Tacoma News Tribune published a long feature profile of Duane Sorenson, founder of Stumptown Coffee: Coffee’s benevolent Mr. Bean. If you’ve wondered what the big deal is with Northwest coffee (specifically in Seattle and Portland), this article gives you a good flavor. It’s not just a matter of how to spice up your daily ...

M

Make iMovie ’08 Work Your Way

Macworld has posted online an article I wrote that appears in the current print issue: Make iMovie ’08 work your way. The idea for the article came to me when I was writing the book, because I found several things you could do in iMovie ’08 that people thought had been abandoned in iMovie HD ...

Browse Categories