(Text link: Big Bang Theory Theme)

Happy Advent Sunday! And you’re all good Catholics, so of course you understood that the Amazon Advent Calendar wouldn’t begin until today.

But if we’re all good Catholics, then we must be wondering why I’m abusing this season to promote the enjoyment of pagan rhythms while steering filthy luchre into my Amazon Associates coffers. Point taken.

I shall make up for this disrespectful gesture by opening the Advent Calendar with a tribute to another good Catholic: Monsignor Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître, the priest who first proposed the theory for the origins of the Universe that would later be called the Big Bang Theory.

He failed to accompany his Theory with a peppy theme song. So I guess they don’t teach you everything at seminary.

Yes, I am quite the nut for this show. It’s as if Chuck Lorre dropped my photo onto a CBS programming executive’s desk and announced “We’re going to make a show that THIS guy will absolutely love.”

The executive pulled the photo closer and examined it.

He was skeptical.

“Does THIS guy buy detergent, snow tires, and movie tickets?” he asked.

“Well, THIS guy finds it simpler to just buy more underwear than do laundry. He knows that Alexei Leonov was supposed to be the first Russian to walk on the moon, but has no idea that there’s more than one kind of tire. And he’s more likely to download a torrent than go to a movie theater,” Lorre replied. “But yes, he tends to spend lot of money on crap he doesn’t need. Crap which can indeed be advertised through the medium of television.”

There are plenty of sitcoms that I like a lot. But even “The Office” delivers more of a “smile and chuckle” sort of funny. Week after week, “The Big Bang Theory” leaves me barking.

Loudly.

I’ve said it before, but I haven’t found a better way to explain the show: “The Big Bang Theory” exists at the precise intersection between “laughing with me” and “laughing at me.”

I have to think that the first band that Chuck Lorre Productions approached for the theme song was They Might Be Giants. Wouldn’t they be the go-to band for a show about four ultrageeks who work at Caltech?

Instead, the theme is written and performed by Barenaked Ladies. It’s hard to imagine that TMBG or anybody else could have done any better. It’s snappy, it’s peppy, the science in the lyrics checks out, and as you step out into sub-freezing weather this winter you will react as I do. Unbidden, you will recall the line

The bipeds stood up straight, the dinosaurs all met their fate

They tried to leave but they were late and they all died

(They froze their asses off!)

And you’ll still be freezing. But at least you’ll be humming a snappy, peppy little tune.

This track is also available on The iTunes Store. But if you buy it there, I won’t receive a kickback from Amazon. I also have it on good authority that one random Antarctic penguin will spontaneously molt and die.

Okey-doke. I’ve been tagged by my Close Personal Friend Jason Snell, with one of those things that people with blogs tag other people with, if they also have a blog.

I tend to ignore these RSS-vectored chain letters. Once you get a reputation as someone who gets tagged and then just does what he’s told…well, where does it end, I ask?

And some of these Tags are absurd. I had to go back and visit a LiveJournal that I’d unsubbed from, just to make sure I wasn’t misremembering, but yes indeed: the guy had received, and executed, a 22-item Tag.

So don’t think that just because I did this tag, I’m going to do any more of them. I’m doing it this time because it came from My Close Personal Friend Jason Snell. If Jason has ever been wrong about anything, then I haven’t been a witness to it. Which means he’s smart enough to use a whole bag of quicklime when he buries the bodies…yet another reason to just do what he says.

The Rules:

1. Link to the person who tagged you. Done.
2. Post the rules. I haven’t finished that one yet, but I expect to have done so shortly.
3. Write six random things about yourself. I haven’t even started on this. I guess I’ve just been screwing around or something. But I’ll get to it, I swear.
4. Tag six other people at the end of your post and then tag to them. Boy…again, I’ve made absolutely no progress on this one. I really need to get on the stick.
5. Inform each of the people you’ve tagged know that you’ve tagged them, and leave a comment on their blog. Another one that I haven’t even started. But at this point I have to wonder if this Tag isn’t all just some scam to increase someone’s Google page ranking. More importantly, I have to wonder if there isn’t some way I can get myself on the top of the pyramid.
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up. Crap. I need to organize my time more effectively. Maybe get one of those Filofaxes or something.

Onward:

The short version of this story is that shortly after “Bowling For Columbine” was released, I spent a couple of months investigating the facts he presented in the movie. As in, I saw the movie several times, made copious notes, and used conventional journalistic techniques (interviews, obtaining primary source material, getting opinions from unbiased experts, etc.) to verify the statements Moore had made in the film.

And I wasn’t even bothering with points that are debatable, like “Are the countries that ban private gun ownership safer and less violent than the US?” I focused on cut-and-dried stuff like “Does the plaque at the base of the Stratofortress on display at the Air Force Academy say what Moore says it does?”

(In case you’re curious: No. No, it does not.)

I discovered that the film was rubbish practically from start to finish, but that’s another story. Suffice to say that Moore got very upset about a certain conclusion I’d made (which was quoted by a film critic). Despite what he claimed in the movie, the Columbine shooters hadn’t gone to bowling class on the morning of the massacre. They cut.

He sent me a curse-filled email. I replied quite kindly, I thought. I explained how I had reached my conclusion and told him that I was unable to uncover any evidence supporting his claim. Moore then said, in so many words, “Who are you going to believe? A team of experienced law-enforcement professionals who spent months investigating the crime and who sent you copied of physical evidence that backed up their findings? Or the teenage girls whom I interviewed a long time after the shootings, who probably would have told me that they were co-conspirators in the JFK assassination if they thought it meant their footage would make it into my movie?”

He promised to send me copies of his own physical evidence. I eagerly gave him my PO box, but I haven’t heard back from him yet. I’ll be sure to keep y’all posted on that.

Kinda-sorta. I’m given a proper title-page credit in an issue of “Ren & Stimpy Comics and Stories” for a joke I provided. If you were a fan of this Marvel comic and remember thinking “That joke has a certain Andy Ihnatko flair to it” at some point, you’re very perceptive. Assuming that it was during the scene where they’re on a car trip and stop at a roadside franchise for a rancid confection called “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Yogurt.”

I was also all signed up to co-write Acclaim Comics’ officially-licensed Mystery Science Theater 3000 comic.

I’d sent a few proposals to a certain editor at Marvel that he had muchly liked, but my ideas Regretfully  Weren’t Right For Marvel At The Present Time. When this editor moved to Acclaim, and they got the license for MST3K…bingo, he sent me an email. While I was in San Francisco for Macworld Expo, in fact.

Alas, the project was canceled before the contracts had even arrived. As I recall, this was about at the time of the Great Comics Implosion, and the MST3K comic was just one casualty. I think by the end, Acclaim kept just two of their most-successful existing titles. They tried to make a go of just licensing their properties to other media.

I’d still love to write comics. But breaking in is even tougher today than it was in the Nineties. You gotta earn cred by self-publishing, or by being a writer in some other medium (like novels, TV, or movies). These days, it’s the editors approaching the writers and not the other way around.

Midway through Leopard’s development process, I got one of those emails that elevates your buoyancy for three whole days. It was from a senior member of Apple’s speech team. “We want to make sure that Text-To-Speech can handle your name properly,” he said. “Could you provide is with a recording of the correct pronunciation?”

I plugged in my good microphone, said my name three or four times into a Quicktime Pro recording, and emailed the soundfile back to him. I soon got a reply with a sample of the alpha version of Alex saying my name in a sentence, which I stamped with my official okey-dokey.

So whenever someone emails me to ask “How is your name pronounced?” I reply “Just go into TextEdit, type my name, and then select ‘Start Speaking’ from the ‘Speech…’ submenu.”

The funny thing? I’ve sort of screwed over all of the other Ihnatkos. My dad had the name before I did…and that’s not how he pronounces it. He uses a harder “a”.

But who are you going to believe? My father and all of my ancestors, or millions of Macs?

Yes, even Graham Chapman. If you want to duplicate my feat, Graham is going to be the tough one. I won’t lie to you.

But why?

It’s not a good-luck piece. Not really.

For a while there I was travelling to London every year. There’s this Coke machine at Heathrow just after the passport stations at Customs & Immigration. I usually take the redeye. The plane lands at 6 AM local time. I’m tired and sore after six hours belted into that seat, and I still have to face what seems like nine hours wobbling and weaving through the rope maze to get my passport stamps.

But one thing gets you through that experience: the sight of that Coke machine, glowing benevolently. Like passing through the gates of Heaven, all of your mortal burdens and sorrows will be behind you as you dance towards that red machine, drop in a few coins, and extract a chilled half-liter delivery system for caffeine, sugar, caramel color, phosphoric acid, Merchandise X, and glorious, tickly bubbles.

I went through that on my first visit. I had answered all of the Customs man’s questions correctly verily launched myself at the Coke machine.

Yes, of course. I had just landed there an hour or so ago. I didn’t have any English money.

When my week was up and it was time to pack my things and head back to the airport, I remembered that slap in the face. So I dropped a couple of coins in my jacket pocket. And when I made my next trip some six months later…I liberated an icy-cold Coke from that same damned machine ten seconds after clearing Customs.

Flipped the machine the bird, too, as I recall. What the hell. They couldn’t un-stamp my passport, could they?

I repeated this wise strategy on every subsequent trip. It’s been a few years since my last visit but when it comes, my first Coke on British soil has already been paid for.

I just never acquired a taste for the stuff. I don’t think it tastes nasty, mind you. But the fact remains that I’ve only drunk coffee twice. Both times, I only drank it because I was outside in the freezing cold and it was the only warm beverage available.

And in both instances, the coffee was free. So I can also honestly say that I have never bought myself a cup of coffee in my life.

I’m supposed to tag six people now. Buuuuuuuut…

…Well, I don’t want to risk tagging someone who doesn’t want to be tagged.

Tell you what. If you want to be tagged, say so in a reply. If you’re a Close Personal Friend, email me. I’ll choose six and append this post appropriately.

Last year’s iTunes Advent Calendar was enough fun that I’m doing it again in 2008.

The concept remains the same: I’m going to blog one song a day from today through Christmas, building up to my favorite Christmas song of all time. Not all of these tracks will be holiday-related. Actually, almost none of them. These are just Cool Songs That I Find Eminently Recommendable.

But there’s one obvious change this year: it’s the Amazon Advent Calendar. You’re free to sample or buy these tracks wherever you want, but all of my links will point to the Amazon MP3 Store.

Why? Simple: because since December of 2007, the Amazon MP3 Store has become a serious challenger to the iTunes Store, and I’ve obtained an Amazon Associates account.

I get a kickback from every track purchased through my links a good feeling from steering people to Amazon MP3. I certainly don’t think Apple’s on the wrong side of the war against digital rights management. I simply believe that I’m better than everybody else and if I want something offa Amazon, I shouldn’t have to pay for it Apple is restricted by the deals they had to strike with the music industry in order to launch the world’s first viable digital music store. Amazon was able to open their store as a 100% DRM-free, high-bitrate marketplace from day one, by entering the market after the aforementioned Industry realized that they’d created an uncontrollable monster.

The benefit for me you is obvious: I will be using these kickbacks to buy cool stuff that I wouldn’t otherwise buy for myself, seeing as I’m a freelance journalist in a collapsing print market and shouldn’t spend my money on fivolities because these tracks are all completely unlocked, you’ll have no problems moving them  between your iPod, iPhone, Blackberry, Chumby, or the novelty USB Christmas ornament you bought last year which is meant to play “Here Comes Santa Claus” when Rudolph’s nose is pressed, but which now can instead be used to Rickroll all of your relatives.

You really won’t notice any difference between adding tracks to your iTunes library via Amazon MP3 versus the iTunes Store apart from the vague nagging worry that maybe you’re somehow being exploited by a journalist whom you kind of trust. The first time you make a purchase, you’ll be invited to download a Windows or Mac helper app that will invisibly manage downloads of tracks and albums and make sure that they automagically appear in your music library.

If you don’t want the app, you can download the MP3s directly and take care of business without knucking under to The Man, and his evil hidden agenda of giving you free software that makes your life easier.

Boy, I hope I make enough from this to get a free Blu-Ray player. And some boss movies. Plus, there’s the higher bitrate. So it’s really a better deal for you guys. Or a Playstation 3…then I’ll have a Blu-Ray player and a game console!

No need to thank me. I’m always thinking about you, the readers. I couldn’t be more grateful to you for reading my little musings, and I cherish this covenant of trust that we’ve built between us over the almost 15 years that this blog has been in operation.

That ought to hold the goddamn bastards. This scam had BETTER work.

The aforementioned render looked good! My little demo contains side-by-side video, synced perfectly.

Already I’ve done one thing that’s impossible in iMovie: combine two video clips in the same frame. I can slap a “talking head” video box over an otherwise bland tourist panorama, or when I’m doing a drive-and-talk I can slide in a subtle little corner thing showing you what I’m talking about…on and on.

Good, good. Let’s go for Two Impossible Things before suppertime: multiple text items, placed in an arbitrary fashion. I want to identify the cameras responsible for each side of the screen.

Another example of something that’s pretty much dead-simple, but first I had to look something up. No obvious “add titles” tool or button or thingamawhassit anywhere in Final Cut’s UI.

Ah. Okay, once again it’s a tool that I can’t figure out until I go away and Google or check the manual, but once I have the answer, it makes sense. Text tools are in an “Effects” tab inside your project window. The project window contains video files, sound files, other sources of content…it sort of figures that as something that generates content, it’d be in there.

(A little button with a text icon in it. Visible. Anywhere. Y’know, Apple, that would have made sense, too…)

Okey-doke. Easy as get-out. Move the playhead to the spot where the title should appear, click the “Text” item, which you’ll obviously find in the “Text” folder inside the “Video Generators” folder inside the “Effects” tab. Drag it into the preview viewer, just as you would a video clip that you’re preparing for insertion.

Click on the viewer’s “Video” tab and you see that the tool has automatically placed the text where you told it to. I used the plain “Text” generator, which assumes you just want to splat it in the middle of the frame. Simple business to just drag it to the lower-center of the “Kodak Zi6″ half of the screen.

Repeat for the Mino. Huh? The text has disappeared.

Ah, simple: looking in the timeline reveals that the “Flip Mino” layer is behind the video layer when it ought to be out in front. Drag, fixed.

Hmm. The “preview” I see here looks…ragged. Is it just giving me a quick render for position? It’ll look fine in the end product, right?

Need to render this out. I read comic books, return, and find that it all looks good.

Now I’ll export this as a Quicktime.

Once again I spot a holdover confusion from iMovie. I can export the movie as a Quicktime. Or I can export it, “Using Quicktime.” Two separate menu items, same apparent function. This needs to be made more clear.

The standard QT exporter is more familiar to me, so that’s what I go with (”Using Quicktime”). I select 720p settings, click the right buttons and…

Blimey! This will be ready in minutes? I know it’s just a 90 second clip, but “burninig” a ten-minute 720p project with these same H.264 settings in iMovie was almost an overnight endeavor.

Annnd we’re done. Open it in Quicktime Player annnnd…it’s crap:

It’s taken the original 16:9 aspect ratio, letterboxed it to 4:3, then converted THAT to 16:9 HD aspect ratio by squashing it.

Fut the wuck?

Oh, and it’s downsampled it from 720p to standard-definition, too.

Le Sigh.

Now I have a brand-new worry. I didn’t see an opportunity to tell Final Cut “Look, Skeezix: I’m doing HIGH-DEF editing. AYTCH-DEE.” I thought it had gotten the message when I started importing HD clips. Must I now worry that all of my content has been converted to this crummy state? Must I begin ALLLLLL over again?

Okay, I’m just going to export this into “YouTube”-ish dynamics (3:2, standard definition).

Good. In the sense that “I intended to do this and easily got Final Cut Express to do what I wanted it to do.”

But now I can’t go back to my “real” editing project until I figure out why this is in standard def, and successfully export an HD clip in 16:9 aspect ratio. Damn and blast.

I’ve just looked in the “Properties” window for this sequence and yes, Final Cut seems to think it should be 720×480. Why? I know I never made that choice. And now that I see that it’s wrong, I don’t see any spot in which I can say “1280×720, bonehead! Get it RIGHT!”

I seem to have found it, inside “Easy Setup.” Yeah, right…”easy”:

Okay, I’m willing to score this one as an Apple failure. I’m apt to use this app to edit all kinds of things. Is Apple seriously thinking that I’ll have to edit EVERYTHING at maximum 1080p definition — even the crappy little VHS videos I’m transferring in — just to retain the ability to edit ANYTHING in HD?

Is Apple seriously saying that the crummy consumer-grade iMovie ‘08 is smart enough to think “Oh, he’s importing HD video…I should edit it as HD, then. Or at minimum, ASK” but Final Cut Express is just a cod-slapping moron?

Rrgh. This bit is needlessly complicated.

Now I don’t know if I can even use any of the stuff I’ve already put together in the “real” project. I’m looking through the UI and the manual, but I can’t find any place to say “See this existing project? With all of the HD clips? AYTCH-F***ING-DEE. RIGHT F***ING NOW.”

Dammit.

Okay. Dinner. I really need a break from this. What an idiotic thing to be dealing with.

Lunch has been eaten, 32 minutes of the Ricky Gervais HBO standup special has been watched. Let’s see how the render went.

Cool. I’m really impressed. I thought “I want the ‘driving in the car’ me to miraculously start talking as soon as the ‘voice over’ me stops” and by golly, that’s exactly what happens in the video. Even though I recorded those two elements completely separately.

I do want to the v/o to add an additional comment as soon as Car Guy resumes his silence. I’ll try the voice-over tool this time.

Cool…that was simple. It counted me down and everything, and when I clicked Stop, I could do some fine-tuning to make sure it came in precisely where I wanted it.

It didn’t precisely match the audio levels of the v/o I recorded in Quicktime Pro, though. Made a half-hearted attempt to adjust the new v/o manually but then simply tabbed back into QT, recorded those few seconds, and then dragged it into the timeline. Couldn’t have been simpler.

(I can see myself using the voice-over tool a LOT. I know you can add voice to clips in iMovie but it seems a lot more organic in FCE.)

I did have to re-render before I could see how the new audio integrated into the clip. But there’s an option for just rendering anything that needs it, so it was quick and painless. Like my recent tooth extraction, except Final Cut didn’t hand me a prescription for Vicodin afterwards.

I realize that I’m sort of doing this the wrong way. You’re supposed to throw together a rough cut and then start adding audio and transitions and text and whatnot. That way, you don’t even need to do a render until you’re nearly done.

But now that the intro is over, I need to start the actual edits. I’m a little bit stuck, but it’s for a good reason: I’ve seen enough of these tools to know that I can now create damned-near anything I want and I don’t know which choices will make for the best video.

Like, how best to do the “comparison” shots? In iMovie, I simply replayed the same shots over and over again, one after the other. In Final Cut Express, it’s no trouble to do a split-screen.

I don’t know if that’s the best choice. I think I ought to start with just a rough assembly of the “single camera” sequence of shots. Then I can replicate it from the Zi6 clips. At that point, I’m free to proceed however I want.

Or maybe it’d be better to create a new project just to screw around with things. It seems like it’d be simple to do a split-screen effect. I create a new proj…

Hmm. Why is it creating a new tab in my project window? If I have a wedding video business but I’m short on cash so I agree to edit a porno, is THAT table going to be sitting alongside the other projects?

I’ll worry about that later.

I decide to use the car door slam as my slate, to sync up the video between the two cameras. Easy as pie to set the start points of both videos. Drag the first vid into the timeline, drag in the second and tell FC “please overlay this”…easy.

So what I want to do is crop out the center 50% of the frame from the Mino, shove it over to the left, and fill the right side with the center 50% of the video from the Kodak. There’s a crop tool. It doesn’t seem to work.

Oh. I need to be in “wireframe” mode. When I saw it in the View menu I imagined that it only came into play when you’re importing…well, 3D models or something. But by cracky, now the video frame has handles, good ‘n’ proper.

Much further twiddling happens before I have one of those “Oh, it’s actually quite simple; the problem is that I’m an idiot.”

You can crop the frame by dragging the corners, or you can click into the “Motion” tab, go to the “Crop” parameter, and type in the number manually. You can move a frame around the screen the same way: mouse it, or just type in a number.

I had a hard number in mind for the crop (please take 25% off of either side) but didn’t know how to translate “please move the center of the frame so that it’s at the exact left (or right) edge” into a number. I overthought it.

Simple: just type a number for the cropping, and then slide the centerpoint manually.

This is a good example of the sort of thing I confront each and every time I test a new piece of tech. I’m perfectly OK with the realization that I’m just a damned idiot. Okay, correction: the reminder that I’m an idiot. It’s frustrating when you can’t make something work but when you find the answer and realize that it really did make some sort of sense all along, your initial frustration shouldn’t be held against the app.

I really do give these things plenty of opportunities to prove that I’ve got some sort of a bent chromosome or something. When I finally say “This thing is a piece of crap,” or “Whoever designed this didn’t know what the hell he was doing,” my arrogance is very hard-won.

I still don’t know what the numbers mean for “center.” If I type in “0″ is that an explicit or a relative number? Would “-25″ mean “to a point 25% to the left, relative to center” or would that mean “25 pixels away from Cartesian zero”?

At any rate: I won’t see the results until I render. Though the preview looks promising.

Smoke if you got ‘em. “About 7 minutes left…” for the render.

Damn. In iMovie, I can just tap the spacebar and see what the final video will look like. In Final Cut, I have to “render” the edit first…though I can scrub through it in the final video window.

Okay, well, if I’m going to sit through a render, I might as well make it worth it. I want the intro voiceover to go over the first bit of the first clip. I drag the audio file into the viewer and release it into the “Insert” hopper that pops up…it’s one of the several options available.

Awesome. Final Cut Express is already saving me time and more importantly letting me make the video I want to make instead of knucking under to iMovie’s limitations. The existing clip scoots over to the right in the timeline so that it doesn’t begin until the audio ends. The spot where I start talking in the clip comes after several minutes of ambient car noise. So now, it should be easy to merely extend the video clip backwards so that the video starts with the voice-over, and I start talking inside the car almost as soon as the v/o ends.

Hooo-kay, I know in the video that the tool I want is one of the three or four in the tool pallete next to the timeline. It uses what I assume to be classic film-cutting terminology…each tool icon depicts a Moviola-style pair of film reels in various postures.

I guess wrong on my first try so I go back to the tutorial video series. Ah! Okay, I want the “Ripple” tool. In the video, it’s described and shown as the thing you use to extend a clip so that it starts or ends in a different place.

Mmmm…no. It seems like I’m on the right track, but no. As it is right now, the 90-second voice over plays, with no accompanying video. Then the video kicks over to me inside the car, and I immediately start talking. I want to grab the left side of that clip and stretch it all the way back to the start of the voice-over so that the video begins 90 seconds sooner, but I still don’t start talking until the v/o is done.

What happens instead is that I still have no video until the end of the voice over…but now the video starts 90 seconds later. Damn and blast.

What the heck is wrong? Is FC stamping its feet because the video I want to extend is the first video clip in the whole thing?

I give up on logic and just randomly try the other editing tools. Ah! Okay. The fact that there was absolutely no video to the left made me think “extend the clip to the left,” ie, use the Ripple tool. In fact, I needed to use the “Roll” tool, which extends a clip by stealing time from the clip next door.

I was thinking “There is no video there to the left.” Final cut was thinking “There is indeed video to the left. It is a video of no video.”

Very Zen.

But it makes some sort of sense. My bad.

Now let’s render this clip and see what I did. I hope the audio is synced. Push the button, Frank…

“Estimate time: About 15 minutes…”

(Sigh.) Okay, breakfast.

iMovie has been acting all passive-agressive on me recently. Take my most recent video, for example. All was skittles and beer for the first half of the project, and then iMovie decided “I bet if I make all of the clips Andy’s carefully built so far vanish, forcing him to repeatedly redraw the window before he can continue to make edits, he’ll eventually get frustrated and knock off for the night. And then I can play Warcraft until tomorrow morning.”

Many of you folks have jobs. I’m sure you recognize this sort of attitude in your co-workers.

It sort of nudged me to finally move on to Final Cut Express. I do try not to request software or hardware from a manufacturer unless I have a specific review or column in mind, but the Final Cut family is indeed an important creative tool and I suppose as an internationally-beloved technology pundit, I have a certain responsibility to have a nonzero level of knowledge about the app.

It arrived Wednesday. I installed it Thursday. And today…I’m taking it for its first test drive. I’ll be making notes as I try to edit a little three-minute video.

Okay. I’ve launched and I’m already confused. iMovie ‘08 (and its predecessors) had a user interface that made its workflow plain to the ignorant observer. I see lots of windows and buttons and sliders and scrubbers and viewers and now I’m so confused that I don’t know whether I want to vote for Obama or Captain Kirk in next purple’s football election.

Staring at it for five minutes didn’t help.

Neither did randomly pushing buttons.

Okay. This isn’t a slam against Final Cut. This app is not promoted or sold as consumer software. It’s sold as prtofessional software. On that basis, it’s not unreasonable that they expect the user to do some larnin’ before doing any editin’.

I open the PDF manual in Preview and start reading. Okay. I’m understanding this.

Retire to the TV room to read some more. Start watching “The Office” on DVR. Get bored with reading. Google for “Final Cut Tutorial” and immediately encounter Apple’s online videos.

MAR-velous. Exactly what I wanted to see. I get to look over someone’s shoulder as they import clips and cut something together. I still have to learn, but now I see the path ahead of me. I watch ‘em all, splitting my attention between the TV and the nice, middle-class-sounding man in the computer.

Back at it. Okay, I’m going to import my video files (MP4s, copied to my hard drive from the Mino HD and the Zi6) using Final Cut’s “Log And Transfer” tool.

The tutorial made it look so easy. The tool shows you all of your video clips. One by one, you can import or reject them, select the in and out points (where you want the clip to start and end in your project), describe the clips, etc.).

Awesome…but it doesn’t want to open any of the Quicktimes I have on my hard drive. No matter what I drag or how I point to something. Hmph. I gather that this tool only works with a camera connected via USB or Firewire. I suppose there’s some sort of logical reason why I can’t use it to process a folder full of MP4s but dammit, from here it seems like a silly and arbitrary distinction.

Okey-doke. I’ll just use “Import Files” from the “File” menu. Cool, it works just as it does in iMovie.

And the tutorial gave me the lay of the land. Viewer on the left is the element that I’m working with at the moment; it’s a video clip, so I can use the viewer to look at the video, decide where the clip should start and end, etc. Viewer on the right is the “live feed,” so to speak. It shows me how my various edits and choices are affecting the final product.

Which is a nice step forward from iMovie. Gives you a distinction between the final product and the elements that make up the final product. In iMovie there’s never a sense of “I’m not ready to build my movie yet but I just want to prepare some of the footage I shot so it’s all clear in my head when I sit down again tomorrow.”

Before I edit, I must organize. I create a separate “bin” in the project window for the clips from each camera.

I also add the intro voice-over I recorded in Quicktime Pro. I love QTP for tasks like this. It’s fast, it’s simple, it stays out of your way, it doesn’t hog system resources.

Oh. Final Cut has a built-in voice-over tool. Ah. Well, maybe I’ll try that later. I’ve got the QTP version just the way I like it. Waste not, want not.

I open the tool just to get a look at it. Hmm. I wish it didn’t drop a window over the viewer that was the exact same style and dimensions. I click the “close” button and am relieved to find that the viewer was right behind it all the time. In situations like this though I worry that the app used the old window as a container and now I’ll have to figure out how to re-open it and put it back where it was.

Whoops, I haven’t had breakfast yet and my stomach is growling. But I want to play a little bit more. I double-click the first video file. It opens in the viewer. I use the same simple controls I use in Quicktime Pro: I watch the video play and tap the “i” key (”in”) to mark the point where I’d like the clip to start. Tap “o” (”out”) to mark the end.

Huh? I’m having a Whiskey Tango Foxtrot moment: the audio is slightly out of sync. I open the same clip in QT Pro. Nope, it’s in sync. Huh, again? Final Cut wants my attention: it’s saying it can’t auto-save the project until I save it.

I thought I already had. Okay, fine, save it…huh? Now it’s created a second tab in my clips browser with the same name as what I saved the project under the first time…!

Okay, screw this. Breakfast. More later.

It was a gorgeous sunny day so I went and shot some more Mino HD/Kodak Zi6 side-by-side demos. I wanted to know if the overcast weather had thrown the Kodak last week. If it’s been “coached” to treat everything like there’s plenty of light and lots of highlights and shadows, maybe it had simply gotten bamboozled.

I haven’t cut the video together yet (Final Cut Express just arrived yesterday; this is Project One for the app). For now, I can tell you that my conclusions still stand. You can see for yourself and make your own conclusions soon enough.

Wednesdays are, historically, not good days. Yes, it’s called “hump day” but in my case, the hump is actually the gestation sac of one of the creatures from “Gremlins.” It typically bursts out of its egg case in the corner of the ceiling at about 2 PM and leaps on my head, still trailing tendrils of amniotic fluid, and immediately commences to beating and scratching me until it gets bored and gives up…usually at around 5 AM the next morning.

Yesterday was a good’n, though. I filed a column that I was quite happy with and then I headed to downtown Boston for Spamalot Day.

Spamalot Day happens in Boston on every November 19, 2008. It marks the anniversary of the time that Chris Gurr emailed me to ask if I wanted house seats to see the show during the tour’s Boston run.

He plays Sir Bedevere/Concorde/Old Woman in the show and when he offered, I hesitated before replying. Should it be “Yes” or “Holy ****, yes”?

But ever the shrewd negotiator, I deftly concealed my intense desire to close this deal. I counteroffered with “house seats, and we get together for lunch before the show.” I really hated to screw him over like that, but business is business. I have a responsibility to my shareholders.

There was only one choice for the lunch venue: Zaftigs in Brookline, of which you’ve heard me speak so highly in past missives. It’s the default place to take folks who are new in town. The food there is so out-of-this-world that I want to eat there every day…but that’s both financially and medically-contraindicated, so I try to limit myself to just one visit per month.

Still, one must be hospitable, mustn’t one? So I steeled my courage and tucked into a combo plate of blintz, kugel, knish, and potato pancake, a cup of chili, and a turkey pot pie.

Chris ordered the chocolate brioche french toast. There are two big perks to taking people to this restaurant. The first one is: lunch at this restaurant. The second is getting to witness people’s reactions to the cuisine. The chef’s culinary aesthetic seems to be “But you’re so skinny! Let me fix you a plate…no, sit, sit!”

Chris’ reaction to his entree was immediate, reverent silence as his brain shut down all unnecessary functions and put his sensory processors into emergency hi-burst capture mode. Which is by no means atypical.

It was a fab afternoon. In fact, I knew that my parking meter was due to click out soon but I was enjoying the conversation. If I got ticketed…well, hell, I was getting more than $15 worth of entertainment there in the restaurant. It would work out OK.

We parted company after I spent another hour or so showing Chris the many delights of Coolidge Corner. It’s my favorite Boston neighborhood. It features Boston’s best bookstore and movie theater, and a small store so overstocked with piles and piles of merchandise of every possible description that I wonder if doctors don’t bring their patients there as some sort of test for epilepsy. There is such intense detail in such minute quanta in such a small area that any weak synapses will quickly give up and spasm trying to resolve the imagery.

The show was just flat-out wonderful.

“Spamalot” has been on my list since it opened a few years ago. But the way Broadway works these days, it almost lulls you into the same lack of a sense of urgency as you have regarding movies. Hits settle into multi-year runs with new casts, and touring companies are top-notch.

In fact, half-price tickets to the Broadway production were available during my last trip to New York but I opted for another show; “39 Steps” was a small, quirky comedy that probably wouldn’t be around the next time I was in town. “Spamalot,” like “Cats,” seemed to be now and forever.

(Uh, yeah…but a week or two later, they announced that “Spamalot” would be ending its Broadway run soon. And “Mamma Mia!” is now in the theater that “Cats” owned for more than a decade; many regard this as an improvement only to theater patrons with fur allergies.)

Regardless, I knew that I’d be seeing the show at some point in life. So in all these years, I’d never bought the cast album or read a synopsis, so that I could see the show “clean”…or as cleanly as you can see any show that’s based on one of your favorite movies.

I really, really wondered what the show would be like. “Spamalot” has to navigate a lot of problems that the authors of “No, No Nanette” never had to contend with:

1. Python fans are going to expect to see their favorite bits.
2. Non-fans are going to expect to understand what the hell is going on without checking Wikipedia every ninety seconds.
3. At $80 for the good seats, even the fans aren’t going to be satisfied with just a replay of the bits they already know from the movie and the TV show.

That last thing was my biggest concern. I and My People worship at the Church of Python. Weve been attending services since we were little kids. We know when to stand, we know when to sit, we know when to kneel, and when the Minister (of Silly Walks) calls for Hymn 132, we immediately start singing “I’m A Lumberjack And I’m OK.” I went to see Eric Idle’s “Greedy Bastard” tour; most of the audience seemed to be just checking off the lines and the songs as they heard them.

(It’s sort of like going to a concert where the band plays lots of their hits. You don’t so much hear the band playing as much as you hear everyone else singing along.)

But “Spamalot” handles all of these problems beautifully. I couldn’t help but think about the “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen,” in which there’s a stage show of the events of the Baron’s life that draw from the threads of his adventures, but which isn’t an actual retelling per se.

It was tremendously good, silly fun that kept picking up steam as it went. As a Python fan, I liked seeing “Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life” done live. As a theatergoer, I had that great experience of spending two or three hours in an entire other place, removed even from seat D-101 (fifth row, aisle, awesome) of the Colonial Theater in Boston, MA.

Annnnd as a big dumb heterosexual male, I enjoyed the fact that at times, there were enough pretty chorus girls in skimpy costumes on stage at once that I couldn’t decide which one to objectify.

I’m saying that you really ought to go see it. Here’s a link to the tour page. It’s in Boston just through the week. Last night, the house was muchly full but I reckon that if you want to find some seats together, you can manage it.

I’ve been asked if “Spamalot” is “family friendly.” That’s kind of a floppy term. I think if you’re okay with your kid seeing “Monty Python And The Holy Grail,” then “Spamalot” will present no additional problems. “Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life” does indeed include the line “Life’s a piece of s***, when you look at it.” And although the language in the French Taunters’ scene is clean, you might spot a gesture or two from the top of the castle walls. It’s your call but I’d have no problems taking a teenager with me.

(SO LONG AS HE OR SHE DOESN’T TEXT MESSAGE DURING THE SHOW.)

(THE CASTMEMBERS HAVE SWORDS. DO NOT RILE THEM.)

At this point in my narrative, I must reveal one spoiler for the show, so avert your eyes, o lord, if so inclined to enter the theater with a blank slate.

Just as in the movie, the location of the final resting place of The Most Holy Grail is can be found in the living rock of a cave protected by a killer rabbit. The Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch dispatches the threat and the answer is revealed in four enormous stone letters.

The knights speculate as to what the letters might mean. “Oi! Oi!” perhaps?

Ah! It isn’t a word at all, sire! It’s a seat number!

D101.

Those of you with excellent memories now realize that this information has a certain relevance to my tale.

“Uh-oh,” I thought.

And sure enough…the houselights were raised and a spotlight snapped on around my seat. Knights and peasants eagerly exited via a set of stairs at the foot of the stage, bounded in my direction…

..and then unexpectedly siezed a man on the other side of the aisle in Row C. The Grail was found underneath his seat and he was hustled onstage, where he received a proclamation of thanks and what appeared to be a rather nice gift pen.

As for me, I was siezed by a heady blend of relief and disappointment, in equal proportions.

The man was wearing an AIDS ribbon. As I enjoyed the presentation and the rest of the show, I imagined that he’d been quietly approached at his seat during the intermission. The ribbon, I supposed, signaled to the cast that THIS was the guy who said it was OK to drag him onstage.

See, I have a bit of a Situation brewing at home. My cellphone was off during the first act and I used the intermission to step outside and check for messages. It all became pretty clear to me later on; the D-101 prop always points to the house seats (likely to be used by someone that someone in the cast knows), they didn’t find me there during intermission, so they just went to Plan B.

So again: relief and disappointment. Relief, because at the moment I looked like I had dressed and groomed myself and left the house in a big hurry after having spent all night working on a column. Disappointment, because I imagined that the Colonial Theater looked really cool from the stage.

(Plus: crap, that looked like a really cool pen.)

I went backstage after the show. I bumped into King Arthur on my way through the stage door. He was fab; I’d love to see him playing the male lead in “Kiss Me, Kate.” He has a real Alfred Drake vibe about him, in voice and presence.

(I’m sure that you know that Alfred Drake originated the role of Fred Graham in “Kate.”)

Chris was, of course, equally fab in his multiple roles and as the Old Woman, he had a fabulous rack; theater tradition insisted that I compliment him on that immediately.

He was nice enough to show me around backstage. What a treat. The Colonial is one of the country’s most significant houses. It’s about a hundred years old and some of the most famous plays and musicals in history debuted here. In baseball, a promising left-hander must spend a season in Pawtucket before pitching at Fenway Park. In Broadway, there was a time when a new production was put on its feet in Boston before moving to Broadway with its final cast and rundown.

We joked about Seat D-101. It wouldn’t have been the first time that one of his guests had wound up onstage. Though he told me that there was nothing pre-arranged about it and that my spending intermission outside on my iPhone instead of inside at my seat had changed nothing. The audience member really is plucked out of his or seat cold.

Maybe I didn’t get the free pen but I did get that other thing I wanted: a view of the Colonial from center-stage:

Center-stage at the Colonial Theater. Can this view ever get old?

I left the theater with Chris and Sir Lancelot and the show’s wig supervisor and we walked to the T. The weather had dropped from Scenic New England Crisp all the way down to “Brass Monkeys, Beware.” We talked about nerdy stuff (theater and technology) all the way until our trains arrived.

I got home very late and very cold but also very happy.

I’m actually planning a rather ambitious comparison of cheap HD cameras in the next week or so. But there’s certainly been an enthusiastic — bordering on, well, “annoying” — amount of interest in a direct comparison between the Mino HD and its natural commercial enemy: the Kodak Zi6.

And no wonder. They’re both the same sort of beastie: pockatable 720p HD cameras in an iPod-ish form factor, selling for about the same money.

(Yes, the Zi6 is about fifty bucks cheaper, but remember: that’s without any memory. Toss in a 4 gig card and you’re more or less square a bit closer to the Mino in price.)

With the holidays coming up, and the chance that Todd from Process Control will make as big an ass of himself at the breakroom holiday party as he did last year, lots of people want to know which of these Discreet Little Cameras to buy. Well, my uniform is proud to serve.

I took both cameras out for a jaunt or two and shot a bunch of clips in a variety of environments. Watch. Draw your own conclusions. And then read on and see if you’re so absolutely brilliant that your conclusions are identical to mine.

Click on the “fullscreen” button to watch it at 1280×720 resolution…just keep in mind that this is nowhere near as good as the original video files.

Flip Mino HD vs. Kodak Zi6 from Andy Ihnatko on Vimeo.

Okay. Based solely on this footage…it’s a clear win for the Mino. I think it’s obvious even in the Vimeo (which has been processed twice already). But here in iMovie, where I can see the original footage straight from the camera…t’s absolutely no contest. The Mino video is more agile, the colors are more accurate, and the lighting is more balanced. The Zi6 routinely produces over-saturated colors and doesn’t appear to have enough bandwidth to record a full range of colors and tones. And low-light shooting is a bit of a mess.

Three full-sized frame grabs illustrate my point. These were taken straight from the original MP4 files. Click the thumbnail for the full 720p frame.

Pulling Out Into Traffic

Mino HD: Note the gray tones in the sky and the cream color of the sign. There's plenty of shadow detail inside the car, too.

Kodak Zi6. The sky and the sign are white, all of a sudden. And inside the car, shadows have turned to mud.

Outdoors, On A Tripod

Mino HD. Nice shot. Maybe it should be a tad brighter. But the lighting is natural and the colors are spot-on.

My shirt is purple, my skin is a little weird (even for me). I think the Zi6's designers told it "Humans like punchy contrast and saturated colors. Err accordingly."

Inside Panera Bread

Mino HD. Nice, bright image with (again) natural colors...not an easy trick, as we're inside a Panera Bread with its muted soup-oriented lighting.

Zi6. Boy, what a crummy at-bat. The wall should be avocado, not lime green. Any shadows have turned into grey mud. My sunglasses are no longer transparent, nor did the Zi6 capture any reflections off the lenses. And it shows that dim lighting is the Zi6's Waterloo. Its only solution in a situation like this is to extend the shutter speed and cut the frame rate in half. This clip was recorded at 15 frames per second instead of the Mino's 30, creating choppy, blurry footage.

Rainy Street Corner

Mino HD. Hmm. The sky is a bit purple. But otherwise...a nice shot. Check out the brick building on the corner. You can see the bricks on the outside and the details of the warm shop inside.

Zi6. This individual frame doesn't look too bad. The Zi6 certainly captured the sky more naturally than the Mino did. But as usual, shadow details have turned to mud...and the dim light has forced the Zi6 to shoot this at 15 frames per second. Quite noticeable when cars drive past.

Okay, so this is a total slam-dunk for the Mino HD, right? It’s time for the Zi6 to slink off to the corner bar to drink itself into a state of apoplexy alongside the Zune and the Sony eBook Reader and every other bit of technology that’s been roundly spanked and made irrelevant by a superior competitor?

Naw, not at all.

Based on two days’ worth of side-by-side shooting, I’m convinced that the Mino HD’s videos are far more natural and pleasant. But I wish that Mino HD videos sounded as good as the Kodak’s. I don’t know if the Zi6’s designers did something as simple as choosing a high gain level for the microphone. Whatever the reason, the “outside Panera” clip handily demonstrates the Kodak’s superiority in this category.

The Zi6 also has the intriguing advantage of being able to go on forever. Which is something that the Mino emphatically cannot do.

The Mino is sealed up as tightly as an iPhone. Its memory and battery are locked inside and can’t be swapped. You record one hour’s worth of video and then the Mino HD becomes nothing more than a conversation piece.

But the Zi6 takes standard SDHC memory cards. To hell with the Mino’s built-in 4 gigs! Buy yourself a 16 gig card and record hours and hours of footage. And because it runs on 2 AA’s, it’ll can run forever. The Zi6 comes with a pair of rechargeables and natcherly, if you ever get caught short, you can just run to the store for some Energizers.

That’s not an inconsiderable advantage.

The Zi6 and the Mino are both “lifestyle” cameras. So I suppose the choice comes down to the sort of lifestyle that you intend to lead.

If image quality is a big item on your wish list, it’s the Mino. If your style of shooting is casual and unplanned — you want to have something handy to shoot baby’s first steps, keep something in your back pocket or your desk drawer in case the opportunity to direct and produce the next “Don’t Taze Me, Bro!” should unexpectedly present itself — it’s the Mino. If you’ll be shooting lots of stuff in low-light situations…the Mino. Already own a “real” camcorder, and want a second one for more casual shooting and the ability to shoot an event from two angles? Mino.

(Oh, I didn’t mention that the Mino is exactly the same size as the original Mino. The Zi6 is small enough to fit inside any pocket, but the Mino is so small that you’ll have to pat yourself down to figure out what pocket it’s even in.)

But if you’re going to shoot “events,” then you’ll want the Zi6. Although you’ll yearn for the higher quality of the Mino, the fact remains that (God help us all) most family weddings go on for more than an hour. And you have better things to do on vacation than keep running back to your hotel room or cabin to free up space on your camcorder. You can shoot a whole week’s worth of travelly hijinx on the Zi6.

As for the ease of editing your footage…it’s a draw. Both of these cameras record plain MP4 movie files. They imported into iMovie as easily as any other MP4 file.

Weird thing about the Flip, though: iMovie recognizes it as a camera and it immediately loads up thumbnails of all of your clips, ready for import…but the import will fail. Huh. But if you import the clips via the “File” menu — treat the Mino as though it were just a USB storage device — iMovie will copy the files into your library without a hitch. No transcoding necessary…it’s just a straight file copy.

Of course, neither of these are “real” camcorders. Spending a couple of days shooting with them made me miss the zoom lens, image-stabilization, and manual features of even a cheap standard-def camera. I guess the “lifestyle” implied by the Zi6 and the Mino involves walking straight up to people instead of recording them from a safe distance, and maintaining a steady posture as you do so.

If this is the case, then clearly I lead an alternative lifestyle.

There’s a reason why I’ve held off on my big review of Kodak’s “lifestyle”-grade pocket HD camcorder…and my Cone of Press Secrecy lifted today.

Yes, Flip was working on a high-definition version of the Flip Mino. Mine arrived just about an hour ago; it’s charging up as I write this so obviously…no sample video yet. Plus, there’s the pesky problem of “this week’s column” to finish.

But to answer your firstest questions:

• It records in 720p (1280×720 at 16:9 widescreen ratio).
• It has 4 gigs of storage, which promises to hold an hour of HD video.
• It looks identical to the old Mino…just marginally wider and thicker.
• Like the old Mino, there’s no card slot and the battery is sealed in.
• $229, or just $50 more than the standard-def Mino (which remains in the lineup).

Oh, and iMovie recognizes it immedately and imports HD content directly…when I plugged it in to charge, iMovie activated and showed me thumbnails of a few samples that were already on the device.

More comments, video, and of course a full review — comparing the Flip HD, Kodak Zi6, the Aiptek Action HD (aka “The Walmart Camera”) against my Panasonic HDC-SD1 (aka the “real” HD camcorder) will follow.

Until then…There Will Be Blood. Er…photos. The HD edition is on the right…to the left is the standard-rez Mino.

[Updated: Yes, the Flip HD is immediately recognized by iMovie. Yes, it presents you with an import panel of thumbnails. But! None of them can be imported. Instead, you need to use the desktop app to import videos from the Flip. Let's hope that it works with Perian. Stay tuned.]

[And the HD model is exactly the same size as the original Mino. Sorry folks...blame the optical illusion of that light-colored band around the original model.]