Tag Archives: Movie Making

Kinda Where I’m At Right Now

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For some people like me its hard to complete things. The mind can be this heaving ocean that floods the corners of my skull with all sorts of ideas. Some seem very cool! The frustration starts when I try to decide which ones I’m going to pursue and put some energy into. My mind wants to move around. So its hard to work very long on one idea.

I’m getting better at following through on an idea, but it is still quite a struggle. Who knows? Maybe it will be a struggle the rest of my life. Health improvements can help I’m sure: eating properly, exercise, taking vitamin supplements…

That’s a struggle too since I tend to eat bad food, drink pop as a comfort to my frustration (I hear processed sugar can work like an opiate in the brain).

The Kinoki pad testing is slightly stalled at the moment. I’ve fallen behind on my Six Sigma class I’ve been taking, and I’ve not done any work on the project with my sister for awhile.

Part of the blame could be placed on panic attack symptoms I’ve been having of late. These have dissipated as I’ve gotten back to being more disciplined in my eating habits and excercise. I’ve had to really struggle to get back to some half-way decent baseline.

Last Friday night I talked myself and my wife into buying FinalCut Express for my Mac. I was excited about some of the post-production problems I hoped it would solve. Naturally, after installing it the program would not work. The splash screen would come up and then the program would silently end… without any messages or anything. That was very discouraging!

I tried everything I could think of… I Googled for information, tried a few things, no dice! Finally I called Apple. Guess what Steve, it doesn’t always “just work!” I waited about a half and hour on hold. Yuck! Finally, I got through and, working with the guy, I was able to get FinalCut Express working. Whew!

Let’s see, I’ve done no work on Chomer.com, or any of my other forward looking projects. But I won’t quit! I want to write a post soon on what’s important in life.

Until Later… God bless!

Keynote and iMovie Issue Resolved

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You may recall that I was trying without any success to save a Quicktime file of a Apple Keynote presentation and then load it into iMovie ’08. The file would be grayed out when I tried to import it.  I found out the correct way to do this! Yes!

When exporting your Quicktime file in Keynote, choose the Large file size. It’s that simple. I imported a logo I made that explodes into confetti. The possibilities are endless!

iMovie Issues

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I really like Apple’s iMovie a lot. But there are some real problems that I keep running into. Some of them I can work around. Some of them I just find myself plain stuck!

  • Placing titles on the movie:
    • It many times does not allow me to place titles on the time line like I would like. It will allow me to place at beginning or end but usually not in the middle.
    • When it gets placed on video, the length the title plays is usually way too long and it puts it in the wrong place.
    • I can fortunately drag the title to the right place and change the duration but it is a very tedious thing to do.
  • Sound:
    • It would be nice to extend the fade in or out length to a longer value if desired.
    • It would be nice to be able to adjust the volume in and out on different parts of a sound clip and not have to split things apart outside of iMovie.

Some frustrating things I can’t so far figure out how to work around:

  • I can’t really do any overlaying of video (video playing on top of video with some translucence inside of iMovie).
  • I purchased iWork because of the presentation software (Keynote). I saw that it exports to Quicktime files (which can be imported into iMovie). Unfortunately I found out that iMovie grays out these Quicktime files and I can’t use them! This was really a bummer because a figured out how to create layers of video in Keynote and have it play just like I want it to… If I could just get it to import into iMovie! Arrrgh! That was SOOOO disappointing!  Apple, please make this work! If someone can direct me to software that gets that Quicktime file generated by Keynote into iMovie I will be very grateful!