At Eric’s suggestion, I just tried importing short movie clips from my digital camera (it can do really grainy video, for about 30 seconds at a time) into iMovie. I remember having tried that once before, and it failed miserably. (I’ve been interested in messing around with movies for a while now, but I never had enough of an interest to justify the cost of a digital video camera.)

This is the new version of iMovie, though, and it now works like a charm. I whipped together a really, really bad string of video clips, and applied a few transitions and other special effects—without knowing jimmy jack about how to use the program. When I click on “photos,” all my pictures from iPhoto are available for instant insertion; when I click on “audio,” my entire iTunes library is ready to be part of the soundtrack. The integration of the applications surprises me, and is damn nifty.

The creative potential of this is huge. And I can export finished movies to DVD, too. The mind boggles at the horrors I am now capable of unleashing upon the world.

My computer really has more potential than I’ll probably ever be able to take advantage of… but, damn, it’ll be fun trying things out. I haven’t been this fired up about the creative aspects of a computer in quite some time.