Live from Austin!

I decided I could now face the SF movie footage. I started importing it… but there was a snag.

I’d used a wireless mono mic with the camcorder. Unfortunately, even when the camcorder is set to play mono audio, iMovie imports as stereo—so I get a bunch of movie files with sound in the left channel only.

I thought about this for a while, and experimented with QuickTime Pro until I found a sequence of actions that would achieve a conversion: Open the movie, extract the audio track to a second movie, export that to mono AIFF, go back to the movie and remove the audio track, add the mono AIFF file prepared earlier, export the movie to a DV stream, and then trash the AIFF file.

Kinda painful. I didn’t fancy doing it a couple of hundred times. So… AppleScript to the rescue! An hour or so later, I had learnt enough AppleScript to write an application which will batch-process a bunch of iMovie DV clips dropped onto it.

I think I may need more hard drive space, but we’ll worry about that later… I can always get a cheap external Firewire drive, I was kinda planning on doing so anyway.

According to Spanish biologist J.J. Negro (Estacion Biologica de Donana), reporting in the journal Nature in April, male Egyptian vultures compete for females on the basis of how brightly yellow the males’ faces are, and that brightness varies directly with the amount of excrement they eat. Cartenoids in dung produce the yellow around the vultures’ eyes, and only the strongest vultures can safely eat enough bacteria-laden feces to get a rich color.