Using My Macbook for something else besides Firefox, Adium, and Flickr Upload

Just got done editing my first video! Ever! That's why I supposedly bought my Macbook in the first place right? So after an awesome outing with Logan yesterday, I finally had some decent HD quality content (after losing a year's worth of pics & vids when my macbook HDD failed) to make my first attempt at editing raw video into something less...well... raw. Yup, that's right...I'm a video editing noob.

I do have a rather nice Panasonic HDC-501 High Definition Video Recorder that is capable of shooting 1080i, so I figure I owe it to myself to do something with the HD content I'm supposedly producing.

Happy to say that I just finished my first iMovie 2008 project and I'm in the process of converting it so I can email/share with others. Figuring out iMovie was pretty straight forward, but I did run into a couple usability issues that left me scratching my head. iMovie does have a few quirks (or at least I did) - like when reviewing my movie project (after adding all clips), sometimes the Frame preview panel goes blank and the only thing I could figure out to get it back was to change the display options for frames/sec using the slider thingy.

Overall, it was pretty easy to start using iMovie though, yet the whole process can be pretty time consuming (editing, adding effects, previewing, etc). At least I now know, and can appreciate what others go through to edit their video content! I could so see myself staying up late night / early morning stuck in the zone editing footage.

I'll update this post with the actual video as soon as it is done rendering and I have a chance to upload it to You Tube or somewhere else.

One final question - what video sharing site do folks use most to share videos online with Friends, Family, the public? You Tube is clearly "the place", but I'm just wondering if there are features/other reasons to use one site over another.