Merry Christ­mas new Mac own­ers! And a spe­cial extra treat for any of you that are switch­ing from Win­dows to your first Mac. Don McAl­lis­ter at Screen­cast­sOn­line has made a free episode of his pop­u­lar video pod­cast avail­able specif­i­cally for switch­ers. Click here to check it out.

And if you find it inter­est­ing and help­ful, I’d highly rec­om­mend you look into becom­ing a full fledged mem­ber of Don’s com­mu­nity. Lots of great tuto­ri­als and infor­ma­tion to help you on your way to becom­ing a Mac genius!

MacZot.com is a site that fea­tures daily deals related to Mac soft­ware. Today they’ve got a deal going on what looks to be a great lit­tle tutorial/manual for switch­ing from Win­dows to a Mac: mac­ZOT » “It’s About Time to Learn the Switch to Mac.”

It’s About Time to Learn the Switch to Mac®” is the most inno­v­a­tive learn­ing tool ever cre­ated for “switch­ers.” It’s all about teach­ing you the Mac by con­nect­ing the dots to Win­dows equiv­a­lents. When the instruc­tor, Saied, teaches you one of the more than 30 lessons on the Mac, you can then instantly try it on the vir­tual Mac that’s built into the learn­ing tool–an inter­ac­tive expe­ri­ence unique to “It’s About Time.”

It’s com­pat­i­ble with Mac and Win­dows so you can check it out even if you’re just think­ing about switch­ing to a Mac.

Direct link

Cor­win says:

I’m work­ing in Final Cut Pro, but the video in the viewer looks very dis­torted… there’s lines all through it, and it looks inter­laced. I just switched com­put­ers from an eMac to the new iMac. I don’t get it, I even have the can­vas size at 100%, so it should be run­ning at full qual­ity. Will it look like this in the fin­ished prod­uct? How do I fix this?

Short answer: your fin­ished prod­uct will be just fine.

Long answer: Most video you tape nowa­days is inter­laced. The LCD dis­play on your iMac is not inter­laced. That’s why your video looks like junk: it’s flash­ing a bunch of lines on the screen, but that’s not how your dis­play works. AH!

So how do you fix this? To work around this prob­lem, you could use a dein­ter­lace fil­ter on your whole video, but then it’d look like junk on inter­laced dis­plays (old tube TV’s and com­puter mon­i­tors). Instead, you have to trick Final Cut Pro into dein­ter­lac­ing your video only when it’s in your can­vas: just resize the win­dow slightly and select “Fit to Win­dow” in your can­vas’ view options. As long as you’re not view­ing the video at 100%, it’ll look just great. Yeah, I know. Silly prob­lem!

Oh, and if you use this trick, your fin­ished prod­uct will still be inter­laced when you export it. And in most sit­u­a­tions, that’s a good thing.