I am getting tired of these “well tested” and “polished” Apple “pro” applications so this is a short story.
Aperture 3 cannot play MPEG-1 videos (at least the ones shot with a less than two years old Sony camera), even though they play with Quicktime, Finder, etc. This is a bug on its own and has been reported to Apple.
However, I decided to convert those to MPEG-4 / H.264 / AVC / whatever-nobody-can-figure-out-thing-that-plays-most-places-today. Studying the various video files I have collected over the years, I made another “interesting” discovery..
Since I started to use iPhoto, I download photos and videos from my cameras to iPhoto, fix the photos, then export a backup to filesystem. Now I noticed that what iPhoto does is that the videos are exported as JPEGs but renamed to .AVI or whatever was the original video file type!! All 200+ videos on my filesystem backup were < 1 MB JPEGs! WHAT AN AMAZING APPLE(tm) FEATURE (*)! (*) (I filed a bug report on this also, and today Apple engineers responded to me that "it works as intended": I have to export the video as "original". I disagree. If I export an event with hundreds of photos and videos, the videos should be exported properly as the photos. I don't want to manually clickety-click each video and select the different export mode.) This once again confirms that "the assumption is the mother of all f*ckups". I can't assume anything with Apple software any more. From now on, all master files go to plain file system first and get SHA256 checksums before being seen by iPhoto or Aperture.
