How do I import my Flip video movies into iMovie?
I recently bought a Flip Video camera. After shooting some videos, I wanted to import them into iMovie. This is what I found out:
What doesn’t work:
- Use the “import from camera” command.
Although iMovie does recognise the Flip camera and automatically pops up the import from camera window on startup (with the camera already plugged in to the USB port), when I try to import a video I get an “Error while importing” message, and nothing is imported.
What does work:
- Use iPhoto to import the videos, and then use these in iMovie (my favorite).
First I use iPhoto to import the videos from the camera. After this, quit iPhoto (this seems to be important to prevent errors, don’t ask why…) After that start up iMovie. It tells me it needs to generate miniatures for all the videos in my iPhoto library. This can take quite some time, depending on how many videos you have imported. After this is done, I can use my movies in iMovie by selecting them in the “iPhoto-videos” in the Events library.
Pros: The iPhoto library is intergrated into iMovie, and has preview filmstrips which allow you to “preview-scroll” through the movie.
Cons: There will probably be duplicate copies of the imported movies in both the iPhoto and iMovie library. This takes up twice as much disk-space.
And iPhoto doesn’t show a preview of the videos you import. It does allow you to skip already imported videos.
- Select “Import movies…” from the iMovie File menu.
Make sure you Flip camera is plugged in to your computer. Now navigate to FLIPVIDEO > DCIM > 100VIDEO. The “100VIDEO” folder is the folder where all your movies are. Select the ones you want to import and import them.
Pros: The videos are on your hard-disk only once.
Cons: The videos have names like “VID00001.MP4″. Not very descriptive… And there is no preview either so you have no indication of what you are importing. - Use the FlipShare program that comes with the Flip camera.
In FlipShare, select one or more videos to import. Then press the “Save to computer” icon at the bottom of the screen. The videos are now saved to your computer. Now select “Import movies…” from the iMovie File menu. Navigate you home folder and then to Movies > FlipShare Data > Videos. The “Videos” folder is the folder where all your movies imported with FlipShare are. Select the ones you want to import in iMovie and import them.
Pros: FlipShare shows nice previews before importing videos.
Cons: When importing movies into iMovie from the FlipShare video directory, there are no previews and the videos have names like “VID00001.MP4″ again…
(Although this text is in English, I am Dutch, and so is my copy of iMovie. So I hope I translated all command- and menu-names correctly)
How can I rename a lot of files at once on my Mac?
To batch rename a lot of files, I recently used Renamer4mac. It’s simple and has a fully functional 10 day free trial. After that it’s $26.
Link: www.renamer4mac.com
Status: Tested it, works nice
How do I truncate an HTML string without breaking the HTML code?
Sometimes on a website, you just want to show the first few hundred characters of a text as an introduction, and link to the full text. But by simply using the PHP substr() function, you’re likely to break the HTML code or cut words in half. The PHP function below allows you to maintain your HTML and complete words while trimming your HTML string. The code is from the cakephp framework.
Links:
www.gsdesign.ro/blog/cut-html-string-without-breaking-the-tags
www.cakephp.org
How do I migrate my Powerbook to my MacBook Pro without a fire-wire cable?
I just got my new MacBook Pro and wanted to migrate my old Powerbook G4 to it. By default, this is done by connecting the two computers using a firewire cable. But my old Powerbook G4 has and old firewire port, and for the new MacBook, Apple for some reason has decided it needs a different firewire port. And now I have no firewire cable to connect the two different ports…
In the installation/migration program, Apple suggest to connect both computers to your local network using ethernet cables. But I was doing this at home and only had one ethernet cable present… Apples next suggestion is to migrate using Airport. I started doing this, but it was very slow and would take about 8 hours to complete (and my hard-disk wasn’t even that full).
I didn’t want to wait that long, so I aborted the migration and decided to create the smallest possible network, and connect the two computers directly using the ethernet cable (so without a router). And this worked! The migration now was finished in about an hour and a half.
Conclusion: If you don’t have the right fire-wire cable and want to migrate your Powerbook to your MacBook Pro, connect them directly using a fire-wire cable.
Status: Tested it, works.
How can I find all IP addresses in my local network?
I have several devices in my local network which need to be configured using a web interface. To reach this interface, I have to point my browser to their IP address. But how do I know which device has which address?
With IP Scanner you can scan your local area network to determine the identity of all machines and internet devices on the LAN. Now you now which IP address to surf to! (the demo is limited to scan a maximum of 5 devices, the full version costs $29.99)
Link: IP Scanner for Macintosh
Status: Tested it, works
How can I protect e-mail addresses on my website from being harvested by spammers?
Spammers use web-crawlers to search web-pages for e-mail addresses. There are ways to make it more difficult for these crawl-bots to harvest your email address. These links tell you how:
Links:
Ten methods to obfuscate e-mail addresses compared
PHP 4 class to obfuscate e-mail addresses (based on above link)
How can I paste a text without formatting?
By default, when pasting text in Mac OS X, the formatting of the copied text is pasted as well. This is supposed to be a feature, but I find it quite annoying. A few programs however, support text pasting without formatting:
Word and Mail: “Shift-Option-Command-V”
Indesign: “”Shift-Command-V”
Link: A New Mac Tip Every Day: Pasting without formatting!
Know other programs that offer this feature as well? Leave a comment!
How can I import my Addressbook contacts into Gmail?
Use A-to-G to convert your Mac Addressbook contacts into a .CSV file which you can import into Gmail.
Link: www.bborofka.com/A_to_G/A_to_G.html
Status: tested it, works
How do I keep image colors the same between Photoshop and Flash?
Change the RGB color profile in Photoshop
When I imported an image I created in Photoshop CS 3 into Flash CS 3, the colors always used to change. They were nice and bright in Photoshop, but flat and washed-out in Flash.
I finaly found out this has to do with the color profile settings in Photoshop. By default, RGB images in Photoshop are saved with the sRGB profile. Flash however uses the “normal” RGB profile, and this causes the color-change.
To stop this, in Photoshop chage the RGB color profile to Monitor RGB. Images created and saved with this profile look the same in Photoshop and Flash.
You can change the Photoshop color profile under Edit > Color Settings…
Original post and more information: The mysterious save for web colorshift
Status: Tested it, works
How do I clear my color swatches in Photoshop CS3?
The only way I know to clear your color swatches palet in Photoshop is to drag each individual swatch to the trash. That sucks! That’s why I created the No Swatches Photoshop pallet to clear your color swatches fast and easy! Just choose “Replace Swatches…” from the Swatches window menu and replace your current swatches with No_Swatches.aco.
