Completing our personal “digital hub”

Lisa decided we needed a DV camcorder a while back–we’ll be moving to the other side of the country from our families, and we could send back video greetings with it. Then her bonus came in…

Yesterday we brought home a new Sony DCR-PC9 DV camcorder. It’s compact, lightweight, and takes both still photos and video. We tested the integration with the Mac this morning–it just works. Using iMovie, you can control the playback of the camera from the computer over its FireWire (aka IEEE 1394, aka iLink) interface. I didn’t have much hard disk space free, so I was alarmed to notice that importing 5 minutes of video took up about 1.5 GB, but I was able to trim it down after importing it and free up some of the space again.

And when I connected the camera via USB, it started up iPhoto and downloaded the photos on the camera’s Memory Stick automatically. I may get some photos on this site yet…
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