Importing Video from a File

In a few minutes, we'll get into the process of actually capturing video from your camcorder into your Mac using iMovie. But for now, let's import a file that has already been captured into iMovie. Doing so gives us a file to play with for now.

iMovie is designed primarily to work with video that is captured directly from a camcorder on a Mac, but it is possible to take video from a PC and use it in iMovie. One way to do this is simply to ask whoever is giving the video to you from a PC to save it in DV format (NTSC or PAL or SECAM, depending on what country you live in), to a portable FireWire hard drive, and to import it from there.

To get to the sample file, you must find a movie file on your hard drive. (Some versions of iMovie come with tutorial files containing video, but you may have to search your drive for any file ending in .mov to find something to work with for practice. I'm going to demonstrate with the iTunes 2 splash screen located in the iTunes folder in the Applications Support folder of the Library on my hard drive.)

To search your hard drive, make sure you are in the Finder. (You'll know because the menu next to the Apple menu will say Finder.) Then, open the File menu and choose Find. You'll need to click the Add Criteria pop-up menu and choose Kind in order to search only for movies.

1. Open iMovie and choose File, Import from the menu bar. The Import File sheet will appear from the top of the iMovie window.

2. Click the pop-up menu at the top of the dialog box and navigate to the movie file you located earlier.

3. Select the movie file and click Open (see Figure 14.1). iMovie opens the clip and when it is done, you'll see it in both the Monitor and the shelf, as shown in Figure 14.2.

   Figure 14.1. The Import File dialog box.

   

   Figure 14.2. A clip selected in the shelf, previewed in the Monitor.