The first thing you need to know about Video is that it's the Great Mother of All Disk-space Eaters (writing this makes me wonder how many other Middle Eastern dictators have introduced a phrase into English?). A 10-minute movie will cost you 2.5G or so.
(As reported earlier, I got into video just before Christmas 2002. I've gotten reasonably comfortable with the iMovie program from Apple, but I suspect that if iMovie is to film editing what iPhoto is to digital photos I've just begun to scratch the service.)
So to address this, I just picked up a 120G Firewire drive from LaCie (who seem to have a big chunk of the peripherals mindshare over in Mac-land) for C$450, about US$300, which seems like a pretty good deal to me.
I must say Firewire is dead slick. I plug the thing into the Mac and then when I turn the Mac on it turns on. When I dismount it logically from the Mac it turns itself off. I daisy-chain the video camera through it and I can do video capture from the camera through the disk into the Mac and back out onto the disk with no signs of strain.
I wonder how on earth I'm going to back this thing up? The persistent tendency of disks to be not only faster but bigger than nonvolatile removable storage media is an ongoing problem. Might be cheapest just to buy two and keep them in sync.
Once you get over the shock of the storage cost of video, you can start to gasp at the CPU cost. It just took 45 minutes to squeeze that 10-minute video into QuickTime format (a mere 22M).
