First I want to say that I have been pretty impressed with the mac mini so far. It is very quiet and performs very quickly for something so inexpensive and small.

But… there is always a but. My mac mini came with iLife ‘05. I wonder if naming the product iLife helps all the geeks feel like they now have a life. I know I felt a little better. Anyway, back to the subject… I tried to work on a movie in iMovieHD for my brother. He is entering a tape for the new Amazing Race show. I have been editing video for the famliy for a while. My weapon of choice is usually Pinnacle Studio 9. I decided to try to do some video editing on my new mac since that seems to be all the rage these days. Well, I have a puny little 80G drive in the mini so I decided to use a portable USB drive for working on my videos. I have a 200G usb2.0 drive and it worked great. I copied the video over firewire from the camera and sent it out the USB to the drive and everything was smooth. I found that pretty impressive for such a little box. The I/O load was not affecting my web surfing and email. On the windows box, when I start to capture video, I leave it alone. Otherwise it tends to drop frames when spooling the video off to disk. +1 for mac.

Then I tried to edit with it. None of the effects seem to work. Then saving the rendered video, er excuse me "sharing" the video was failing and giving me some error message about the drive not having enough room. I finially tried to "share" the file and used the local hard drive as the destination. Everything worked. I suspect if I moved all my files over to the internal drive that everything would start working. I guess now I will get to understand how the apple support system works. :)