Apple lock-in

Posted on August 23, 2006

This is just me joining the chorus of people complaining about Apple’s lock-in strategies on their products, so if you’re not into that stuff, please disregard this post and move on.

Last night I finished what I hope will be the last version of my January snow trip’s movie.

It took me hours to edit the thing and it is by far the most complex and time consuming edit I’ve ever made.

In the end I distilled some 60-70 minutes of footage to a 14 minutes, 45 seconds movie with the most amount of cuts I have ever made in my life (although yes, I’m nothing more than an amateur).

And now that I’ve done it and I’m almost at the point of burning the DVDs (right after I hex-edit the .IFO files for wide-screen correctness, oh well…) I feel that queasiness in the pit of my stomach that if I ever want to go back and re-cut any of the film I’m essentially dead in the water.

You see, for a number of reasons (including having started the editing phase during the event itself and having nothing but my trusty old iBook G3 with me), I’ve edited the video on iMovie and the soundtrack on Garage Band.
So what this means is that I can’t get anything remotely like an EDL out of it and ,as such, I can’t ever go back and get the project together again unless I keep the huge project files (and the footage I captured) and I keep it up-to-date to the most recent versions of iMovie.

Of course, had I done this on Final Cut, I’d be in the clear (as much as possible, anyway), but this way I just know that if my DVDs ever break, my movie, as I know it now, will essentially be gone.

And I just shudder at that prospect. Not that this is award-winning material, not by a long shot, but it really matters to me.

Oh well, yet another reason to upgrade my laptop to something that can run Final Cut, right? :-)

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