I have a video editing project with no particular deadline, though I’ve put it off long enough that now I want it over so I can spend time procrastinating on other projects. For the past two months, I’ve been working on it, getting frustrated with my preferred software which is not OS X ready, and putting it aside. So when it turned up on my To Do list today, I thought I’d try out iMovie, Apple’s consumer-level DV software. My project doesn’t require too much fancy stuff and iMovie should deliver the basic titling and cross dissolves I need.
Well, it does all that, but not very smoothly on my machine. About three hours into my work, it decided it didn’t have enough memory and quit. Now my 450 MHz G4 computer is kitted out with 512 MB of RAM, enough for every other application I’ve ever run. Either iMovie is bad at memory management or I need to add RAM. Of course, since the average lifespan of computers is 3 years and my computer is 2.5 years old, perhaps it’s time to start thinking about a future purchase.
Maybe there will be a 1 GHz dual-processor G4 for my birthday 8 months from now… (Do you think that’s enough of an advance hint?)
