My parents got me a JVC GR-DVL120U MiniDV Camera for Christmas this year, which is awesome. Unfortunately, the camera didn’t come with either a tape or a 1394 cable… I got Chuck to bring over an old tape he shot at Stellafane 2000 so I could play around yesterday, and Johnny ended up giving me another tape (because he got a camera as a gift as well as a 6-pack of tapes)… Today I went out to get the cable and some blank tapes… I used iMovie to transfer the Stellafane video from Chuck’s tape to the Mac, and then logged all the different cuts. I have been playing around with iMovie a bit now that I have something to use it with, and it seems nice (if not basic). I think I feel a bit more comfortable in Final Cut Pro, though… But I am not laying out $1000 to pick it up…

Since I didn’t end up using Johnny’s tape for much, I dumped the Stellafane footage back out to it to give back to him… I figured that since he was there he might like the footage to play around with. It’s weird, because he was asking me for help with using his camera with his PC, and since ALL of my 8-ish hours of DV work has been done on Macs, I was absolutely no help… He had some crappy-looking editing suite that came with his fancy Radeon, but it was so anti-intuitive it was sickening… Anyone know of any cheap, simple, 1394-aware video editing packages for someone who just wants to simply edit home movies and the like? I thought of personalStudio, which I recommended to him, but their online store is currently borked… It appears that they still have a demo available, so he should be able to play around with it in the meantime.