My new toy is here. The courier attempted delivery of our new Canon GL2 DV camcorder on Friday between 10 and 11. I picked it up yesterday afternoon. Very cool toy.
I plugged the battery in soon after I got home so that I could play with it. After we returned from dinner at Ambrosia’s (highly recommended) last night, I shot 4 minutes of DJ on the phone with Isabelle. Yeah, not terribly exiting stuff, but I wanted to play my new toy. 
This morning, I hooked it up to a Firewire port on my Mac to transfer the video. The documentation that comes with the GL2 refers to connecting the camera to your computer with a “DV cable (commercially available)” and to “Refer to the respective software instruction manual for further details”. As no video software was supplied, I made a quick trip to my main search engine. I didn’t find anything relevant, but I did find a rather funny video review of the GL2. After a bit of head scratching, I tried running iMovie. Lo and behold, I saw “Camera connected” in the main window, and controls to Import, rewind, play, etc. Cool! I rewound the tape to the beginning and proceeded to import the 4 minute clip. It’s just amazing how much space DV takes up. The imported clip was 833 MB. Ummmm, Yikes! It’s a good thing I added a couple of 160GB Firewire drives to my system a couple of months ago in preparation for this.
A couple of other surprises - the camcorder did not come with a DV tape(?!?), nor did it come with a Firewire (1394) cable. You’d expect those to be supplied with a camera that costs what the GL2 does.
As the scheduled arrival of the little Pooklet is less than two weeks away, I’ll be familiarizing myself with the new toy quite quickly.
