XP Video No Match for iMovie
Microsoft wants you to believe that Windows XP soars at making digital home movies. You’ve seen the commercial: As a happy Windows user spreads his arms and flies, a kid captures the surreal scene with his camcorder, then uses Windows XP to edit his footage.
I don’t buy it. Windows XP has many fine features and even an advantage or two over the Mac. But as a movie-making platform, it’s farther from Hollywood than Buffalo, N.Y. Indeed, with its new iDVD 2 software, Apple has only strengthened the Mac’s lead as the premiere platform for moving pictures.
I’ll talk about iDVD, but first let’s inject some truth serum into Microsoft’s commercial. Windows XP does indeed include a video-editing program, Windows Movie Maker. But several factors make the Mac and Apple’s free iMovie software a better digital video studio.
For starters, of all the Windows desktop and laptop systems available, only a few contain FireWire jacks. FireWire, also called iLink and 1394 in the Windows world, is the connection scheme used by today’s mini-DV-format camcorders--and it’s built into every Mac. So unless that Microsoft Kid shops carefully, he’ll have to buy, install and perhaps troubleshoot a third-party expansion card before he can even get his video into Windows XP.
And then he’d find a nearly barren editing room. Windows Movie Maker lacks iMovie’s array of special effects, transitions and audio controls. To add text titles to your Windows movies, you must create the titles in a separate program, and the titles can’t be superimposed over video scenes.
Windows Movie Maker also falls short at getting edited video out of the computer. Even if you have a FireWire card, you can’t record your video back to tape without buying a third-party program.
This isn’t to say you can’t equip Windows XP for video editing. Several companies make terrific video add-ons for XP. But they’re add-ons: They cost extra, and getting them to work together can require some troubleshooting.
By comparison, any current Mac is factory-equipped to import, edit and export video.
And two Macs are factory-equipped to burn finished videos onto DVD discs.
The two high-end Power Mac G4 models include Apple’s SuperDrive CD and DVD burner. These two Macs also include Apple’s iDVD program, which makes creating DVDs as easy as clicking and dragging.
Apple released a new version of iDVD a few weeks ago, and there’s good news and bad news to report. On the plus side, iDVD 2 gives you more control over the design of the on-screen menus viewers use to navigate your DVD’s movies and slide shows. The original iDVD limited you to a few rigid designs, but the new version lets you customize menus with still images or movies.
iDVD 2 also lets you create slide shows with soundtracks. Drag a few dozen digital photos into the iDVD window with your favorite MP3 music track, and iDVD automatically times the slide show so that it ends with the music. It’s a great way to share digital pictures.
The new iDVD is the first Apple program to require Mac OS X. In iDVD 2, Apple has taken advantage of OS X’s multi-tasking talents to support “background encoding”--as you design your DVD, iDVD 2 works behind the scenes to prepare your video files for burning. That means you don’t have to wait as long to see the finished product.
The bad news? Bugs. In projects containing more than an hour or so of video, iDVD can choke late in the burning process, turning a $6 blank DVD into a drink coaster. And on some systems (including my own), installing iDVD 2 causes some Mac OS X functions to go haywire.
Apple will release fixes for these and other iDVD problems. Reliability is another of the Mac’s advantages over Windows--Apple can’t afford for that to change.
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Jim Heid is a contributing editor of Macworld magazine. He can be reached at jim@jimheid.com.
