Spending the weekend at Amy’s. As usual I have my Macbook with me, and once again it’s being really rather useful. This time it isn’t remotely connecting me to a VPN, or anything special like that; this time it’s doing some video editing with iMovie.

Amy’s digital camera records video, but only in 1 minute segments. She’s recorded some video from a live music session in a local pub and wanted a way to stitch them back together to put onto YouTube. My first reaction was to use Windows Movie Maker since it comes free with XP and is fairly easy to use. However, after half an hour of faff we came to the conclusion it didn’t like her computer or camera’s video.

First we had to find the software which, unusually, wasn’t available by default on the machine. Then once it was installed, it happily complained that .mov files aren’t valid Windows Movie Maker files. Yeah nice one Microsoft!

iMovie, on the other hand allowed us to glue the videos together, add cheesy titles and render back to a video suitable for sending to YouTube.

My Mac seems to be developing a fault, or is just being strange. If I show a fairly complex image on the screen and twist the lid hinge (as though adjusting the screen so I can see it better) the display corrupts. It’s not major screen corruption, but the odd random pixel will display the ‘wrong’ colour. It’s as if the screen draws all pixels of one colour the inverse of what they should be. I have a feeling it’s a heat issue.

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