Mac.sis making macs and S60 handsets talk

Day before yesterday, I returned from a two-week sailing trip that took us from the Turku archipelago to Hanko and then Tallinn, Estonia and back via Porkkala and other locations in the southern coast of Finland.

During the trip, I had a dedicated consumer-level DV video camera for shooting parts of the fun, but there were instances where the camera just was not handy, and I used the N95 video instead.

Back home, I compiled the shoots into a family video type of compilation, and I must say the iMovie works just sweet with the N95 video. Quality-wise, there is little difference between the DV camera shots and the N95 shots apart from the lack of image stabilisation in the latter. In the final "family mix", the content from the two devices mixes together very well, including audio quality.

I had used a stupid widescreen setting in the Canon DV camera which caused letterboxing in iMovie, and N95 did not have this. When interleaving the shots from the DV camera and the N95, I resorted to using the letterbox effect in iMovie for the N95 scenes, and now the content from the two devices is practically indistinguishable.

I did notice, however, that the DV camera does much better in low-light situations, but I am very impressed with the N95 video features overall, and the fact that the format can be directly dropped into iMovie makes the device very usable as the occasional video camera.