• Screen resolution: Because I used 1920×1200 resolution at home, switching to 1440×900 takes some time to get used to.  For my work anyways, where dpi isn’t a big concern, I wish the resolution was higher.
• Keyboard: The black color of the keyboard is the worst part of the whole design, IMO. Why black?  Matching color for the screen?  Could have used white.  Worry about readibility of the illuminated keys.  Use a blue color for the light instead of white light.  It would look so much better day and night.  For the touch and feel of the keyboard, I think it depends.  I don’t have a problem with it but I can imagine some people might not like it
• Battery: Although I got almost 4 hours of light usage but I think if they can put just a little more juice in the battery, that would have been even better.
• Memory: 4G is kind of tight for me.  I know some people say it actually supports more than 4GB, but I haven’t tried it.

The main reason why 4GB is tight for me is because I use VMWare.  I am not saying VMWare is a memory hog.  Virtualization, no matter you use Parallels or Fusion, it will use up quite a bit of memory.  Occasionally, I have to run multiple VMs to do testing and stuff.  That’s why, memory is my best friend. 

I also noticed that VMWare Fusion tends to hog CPU (in certain situations) and if you are not careful and leave the VM running even if it’s idle, it can drain your battery in no time.

I found that whenever I put my MBP to sleep with the VM running or I suspend the VM and then resume it, even the guest os is idle, the vmware running on the host os will hog CPU, from over 30%-50%.  The current work around requires you to restart your guest os (in my case is windows xp). I haven’t tried on other guess os just yet.

The thing is that I didn’t notice all these VMWare issues until I setup my MBP because these issues are not obvious on the Mac Pro with more memory and more CPU power. 

• it has a 23/39-117mm dual wide angle/zoom lens. The 23mm lens is just super handy
• records MP4 movies
• iMovie 08 had some problems with it when it was first released but after a couple of updates, iMovie seemed to be happy with the movie files captured by that camera.Everything was so working-fine until this little camera broke down. I think it was because I carried it in my jeans’ pocket while I was riding on my friend’s motor bike in Taipei.

Oh well, cool. Time for a new camera! I wanted to buy one that fulfill the main requirements above. After a bit of research, First, I was thinking of Panasonic FX-500 due to the wide angle zoom lens, touch screen and what not. But then, the video recording was only motion-jpeg. Yuck!

Then, I saw the Samsung NV24HD that is almost a perfect match of my requirements. I had some hesitation initially because of its rather new entry to the market and the below average picture quality. But then, it’s a compact, I thought. And it should be a fun camera. So, right before I left for London last month, I got it. And it was, indeed, a fun camera.

So I took loads of pics and movies on my 4G cards. Back home, iPhoto/iMovie time. Only to find that iMovie 08 is not happy with the MP4 files. Then, I found out I am not the only one out there having this issue.

So, yesterday, I finally got some time to play around with the files and found a pretty good work around. The solution I came up will both transcode the files into iMovie 08 compatible format AND have iMovie import/generate the thumbnails fast (well, it will never be fast in iMovie 08 when it comes to Thumbnail generation, but it’s quite reasonable)

Option 1: QuickTime

I tried transcoding using QuickTime Pro. I found that when you get the settings correct, you will get the file exported with pretty much the same quality and import to iMovie really fast. The steps are:

1. Load your clip in QT (that’s a given)
2. File->Export…
3. In the “export:” combo box, choose “Movie to MPEG-4”
4. In the “use:” combo box, you can use whatever. For me, I started with “Lan/Intranet”
5. Click “Options” and you will see a screen similar to the one of the right. Choose “H.264” for Video Format.
6. Make sure you set the “Data Rate” to at 6000-7000 (that’s around the same bit rate as the original clip)
7. Make sure you set the Frame Rate to some value (I set it to 30 to match the clips I got)
8. For key frames, I found that if you use QT, it doesn’t matter that much and I tried “Automatic” and Every 150 Frames but they both produced files that import to iMovie with similar speed. If you have a problem with import speed, try using a smaller value. Now if you use VisualHub, key frame setting does matter on both the import speed and within iMovie when you slide you mouse over the thumbnail. (more on this later)
9. Optionally, you can click “Video Option…” and change the Encoding Mode to Mult-pass, but I found the Single-pass is good enough AND Faster

I tested with a 12s clip and it took QT about 40s to export and about 5-6s for iMovie to import/generate thumbnail on that file. Not bad but not good enough because:

• QT encoding is rather slow
• QT does not do batch export. You have to write an Apple Script to perform batch export (which you can find it easily on the web but I didn’t like it)
• Most importantly, the NV24HD always leaves a blank frame at the beginning of the movie. Using QT to transcode the file will either leave the first frame as blank or fill it in with the last frame. C’mon, Steve.

Option 2: VisualHub

Then, I tried VisualHub. The quality of the output is great as long as you jack up the quality to high or “go nuts” (over killed though). But I found that the output files import/thumbnail generate really slow in iMovie and sliding your mouse over the thumbnail was very choppy. After testing with a series different settings. I found that the key setting is the GOP setting of ffmpeg library used in VisualHub. So, I recommend the following:

1. Use the MP4 Tab
2. Select H.264 Encoding
3. Select High for Quality
4. Do NOT select Hint for Streaming because this only marks the output as Streaming (therefore, not able to download) This will produce files that are not importable to iMovie.
5. Click Advanced…
6. In “Force:” Combobox, select “FFmpeg Decoding
7. in the “Extra FFmpeg Flags” type “-g 10” or select “Use /n/ keyframes” and modify n to 10 (Same thing). You can have a bigger value but I found that the smaller the keyframe interval, the faster the output file gets imported to iMovie and moves smoother when you slide your mouse over the thumbnail.
8. The smaller value also produce bigger file (as more keyframes are being put into the file) but I found that 10 is probably the sweet spot.
9. That’s it. Drag your files to the list, set your output directory and click start.

The 12s clip took VisualHub about 30s to transcode with the settings above and 10s for iMovie to import/generate thumbnail. In iMovie, sliding your mouse over the thumbnail is also very smooth just like using QT.

Sweet!

So, for those of you who have VisualHub, I recommend using it instead of QT.

Note that your mileage may vary as I was doing all these on a relatively fast disk (4-disk, 70% full RAID 5 Array) with around 200MB/Sec throughput left. My Mac Pro and graphics card is a little old though, the first generation Dual core 2.66GHz x 2 and the ATI 1900XT. It would be interesting to see if I can push the speed even further with my 8 disk RAID 5 empty partition