From here (never miss it.)

...Jean-Charles, my French brother-in-law, asked me for some PC help - he wanted to make a home movie of his daughter’s birth, and just couldn’t seem to get anything to work. So I went over to his house to take a look. If I knew then what I knew now, I’d have brought a pistol and put a bullet through his PC. The movie-editing software was aimed at the consumer, much in the same way that North Korean artillery is aimed at Seoul, and it’s fairly recent. Apple’s iMovie has been out for a couple of years, so the PC boys have had ample time to study it, see what makes it work. And did they learn? No. There’s no incentive to learn. They developed an interface based on iMovie - clips on the right, editing line on the bottom, viewscreen in the middle. And then they PCified by adding seventeen icons and check-box options that had nothing to do with anything you wanted to do. Still, I figured I could help.



He’d plugged in his camcorder, let it roll, and downloaded 25 minutes of video. As with iMovie, the program cut the video into separate clips, depending on when he paused the camera. But whenever you clicked on an individual clip to edit it, the clip went back to the beginning of the movie. Each clip had an icon that showed how the scene began, but each clip started at 00:00:01. Huh? I hunted around for the location of the clips, and found the right folder. There were no individual clips. The program recorded the video as one gigantic bolus, and pretended that the clips were discrete files, which they weren’t. So when you edited any portion, you were working with the entire 3.3 gigabyte file. I cannot begin to describe how farked this is. Trust me.

Nevertheless, I tried to edit a clip, moving the sliders around. In iMovie, when you snip footage from the start or end of the clip, it disappears; in this program, it’s still there. The only way you can save your changes, it seemed, was to work on another clip, whereupon the program asked if “you want to save the changes you made in the options menu.” It goes without saying that I had not done anything in any options menu.

We trashed everything he’d done and started again. Started the program. Let’s make a new movie. How do we do that? Ah - here’s the Wizard. It says “choose NEW PROJECT from the menu.” As God is my witness: there was no menu that said NEW PROJECT. “Click on that” said Jean-Charles, pointing to a small icon of a movie camera. “That makes a new file.” And so it did. Very intuitive. Next step: I was presented with an interminable menu of “templates.” What these templates meant, or looked like, was not explained, and some of them were file formats. If you’re going to make a movie at a certain dimension with a certain codec, you’d better decide ahead of time. I chose no template. Now, let’s get the video, which we do . . . how? “There,” Jean-Charles said, pointing to a button that said CAPTURE PICTURE.” Of course, pictures are still images to most people, but never mind. I pushed the button. Nope: got a box that said the camera was not running. In iMovie, you can hit the import button without the camera running; this program required you to run the video before you started capturing, thereby assuring you lost the first few seconds of the scene. To top it off, the dialogue box had this merry statement:

CATASTROPHIC FAILURE

Excuse me? If the camera explodes and destroys your footage, that's a catastrophic failure. It the subsequent fire burns down your house and the surrounding blocks, leaving you homeless in the merciless void of a Minnesota winter midnight, that's a catastrophic failure. While I'm happy to live in a culture where the inability to import digital imagery is a CATASTROPHE, language that didn't invoke mass destruction to describe the program's inability to communicate with a peripheral might have worked as well. Even better, if I dare say.

Who writes this crap? Who? How do people who have no idea how to create a video-editing program for consumers end up writing video-editing programs for consumers? It’s like getting into a car that won’t let you cinch your seatbelt until you’ve entered a Driving Template (Highway? City? Mixture of the two? Rush hour? Rural two-lane blacktop?)

It’s possible that there were solutions buried deep in the help menus, but Jean-Charles had spent an hour reading them, and learned nothing.

Oh, and as for importing music: iMovie lets you browse your iTunes library and select what you want. This program required you to select the tune ahead of time, and move it to a special audio resources folder. Then you can import it.

I should note that this was a 2001 era PC, and did not have a Firewire port. He had to buy one, install it, find the drivers for his camcorder (a c. 2001 model that worked the first time when I plugged it into my laptop) and slaughter some doves while chanting LLIB SETAG SI DOG with a Phrygian accent. My Mac came with Firewire standard in 2001. Yes, yes, yes I know, you could get a PC with Firewire in 2001; duh. But I think in 2001 it was hard to get a Mac that didn’t have it. And when he wants to burn his movie, he’ll have to get a DVD burner, which I had in 2000. And yes, yes, you could, etc. Point is, I’ve found that with Apple, the future is already installed.

Was his machine cheaper? Yes. But time is money; I’ve never had to claw my way through the sodden mess of a corporate website looking for the one driver that will let me do what I want to do. (The last peripheral driver I needed was incorporated into a system update.) I’ve never had to spend a Sunday afternoon trying to understand what iMovie wants me to do, because it does what I want it to do. Jean-Charles said that the program made him feel stupid, because he couldn’t figure out the simplest tasks, and I reassured him that this was hardly the case. If the software makes you feel Geefish, it’s the software’s fault. Video-editing on this level shouldn’t be hard. It’s checkers. If the program makes you feel as though you’re playing chess in the dark with oven mitts, blame the idiots who wrote the program.

I’ll say this for his machine, though: if he ever wants to back up that 3.3 GB movie file on floppy disks, he’s all set.