Why are you using Apple’s MacBook? Because it works great and is the best choice for video editing and other multimedia related tasks.

That is the answer I usually get when I ask my friends about their love for Apple. I’m sure all of that is true and you can’t find comparable tools that run on Windows or have such a stable system that you have on Apple’s computers (right…).

But let’s say that we have a major school event starting in 20mins and the last movie clip just completed exporting in FinalCut and we would like to move it to a Windows 7 computer connected to a projector. No problem, let’s put it on a portable disk drive… but wait a second, our movie is 4,8GB in size (just a bit bigger than standard DVDs) and FAT32 can only store files smaller than 4GB. Well, let’s format our disk to NTFS and store it there. Oops… MAC OSX can’t write on NTFS drives (I know you can fix this, but it’s not time to experiment right now…). Ok, then let’s connect it directly to the projector and simply switch input when we’ll need it. But hey, it doesn’t have a standard VGA connector and we don’t have an adapter for “mini VGA”.

And what to do now?

At first you would say that we are doomed, but just about a minute later Marko came with an old camera and a short S-Video cable and said “We’ll just point it at Mac’s screen and connect it to the projector.”. It didn’t seem like a very promising idea at first but at the end, it worked like a charm!

It is very sad that such a “highly appreciated device” fails to serve its cause and that things like cameras need to be used to protect its reputation.

I don’t need any more anti-Apple arguments from now on.

P.S.
I forgot to take pictures of our final solution but I’ll try to get one from our photographers.