The nice man from the post office arrived at our door yesterday carrying a parcel from Amazon. Unwrapping it revealed the Western Digital “MyBook” we bought last week.
It’s a 500 gigabyte external hard drive - and it’s fast. The main reason for buying it is video editing. Upon plugging our video camera into the Macbook for the first time last week, we discovered just how horrific raw digital video file sizes are.
We were informed that the remaining half of the Macbook hard drive could carry in the region of 1 hour of video - and that would have been before attempting to create a DVD image. Suddenly a whopping great external hard drive seemed like a good idea. The biggest surprise was how reasonably priced they have become. Storage is indeed cheap these days.
Another surprise has been just how capable and easy to use iMovie 08 is on the Macbook. Until we had the video camera we had no reason to use it - but have been both amazed and delighted so far. Of course this means W can confidently get creative with the various video clips we record in order to make an “all about us” movie for our prospective children.
Now we have all the hardware, we just need to learn how to make an interesting short film - an entirely different (and new) skill.