Time to Get a Mac?

Today is my wife and my ninth wedding anniversary. (I think that's correct; I know it's not "my wife's and my," because together we only have one anniversary, and calling it just "my" wedding anniversary feels wrong.) Most of our presents to each other these days have to do with our children, so I wanted to make a very simple slideshow/movie of our daughter, showing how she grew up over the last 20 months. I know you can just put all the images in one directory and use any number of techniques to display them as a slideshow, but I wanted one file so it would be easy to move around, and maybe even convert to 3gpp2 to play on a cell phone. I used Picasa to pick the photos and edit them, but I didn't like Picasa's create movie feature. I did a quick search on the web, and Windows Movie Maker seemed to be the simplest way to do it, and besides I already had it on my computer and I've used it before for basic tasks.

So I launched Movie Maker, imported my pictures, and put them in order on the storyboard. But I wanted transitions from picture to picture - not hard cuts - and my transitions palette was empty. I looked in the help files, but they all assumed the transitions were there, and there was no information on how to import transitions. So I Googled the problem, and found a number of web pages, of which the most useful was this one. Apparently, a lot of people have had this problem, going back almost three years, but there is still no fix from Microsoft; the Microsoft support page on the issue just pointed people at the link above I had already found.

One problem is that Movie Maker, like Internet Explorer, is "part of Windows." So you can't just uninstall it and reinstall it. It doesn't even show up as a "Windows component" in the add/remove programs control panel. The only way to reinstall it is to find the right INF file in a Windows directory and reinstall from there ... but to do that you need to have a set of Windows XP SP2 disks, or the files from your upgrade, and I couldn't find either. (I believe that computer already had SP2 when I bought it.)

Another problem is that the transitions are not stored as, say, FILES IN A DIRECTORY CALLED "TRANSITIONS," which would be the logical way to do things. So you can't find that directory and look inside it to see if your transitions are there, or copy in the files from some other source. Instead, the transitions are stored as a set of ... wait for it ... registry keys!?! Luckily, one helpful person had taken the commands you need to insert the right keys and put them together in a REG file (like a batch file, but for registry changes). So I ran the REG file, restarted Movie Maker, and my transitions were still missing. Following some advice in the forum, I retried it after turning my security software off (and disabling my Internet connection just in case), but that didn't work, either.

Then I read further down the thread, and it turns out that you can put the necessary keys in registry, but the next time you start Movie Maker, it somehow deletes the keys! I opened up my own registry using Registry Editor and confirmed that that was in fact happening on my machine. The fix for this is to manually open the appropriate registry key folders and edit the permissions so your own user account cannot delete them. This eventually did solve the problem, but it is the first time I have ever manually edited the registry, and it is something that you are generally are never, never supposed to do unless you know exactly what you are doing.

Now, I am reasonably adept at using a computer. I can reformat a hard disk and reinstall Windows, I can add more memory, my home desktop is a dual-boot Ubuntu/Windows machine, I do lightweight programming in my company's scripting language, I can do a little SQL in a pinch, I know my way around a raw HTML page, ... I'm no developer, but the fact that it took me an hour to get Microsoft's basic movie editing program to behave properly in order to make the world's simplest movie is ridiculous.

Like many people, I'm sure, I've had my eye on the MacBook Air for a few months now, especially the $3,000 solid-state version. Unfortunately (or fortunately), though, I'm also very good at not buying things that I don't actually need. But I'm sure in iLife my home movie would have been a snap, and it probably would have ended up looking better, too.

Oh, and if you want to see the movie, and your email can handle 25 MB attachments, let me know.