11.6. Editing Digital-Camera Movies

11.5. Managing Movies Imported From Your Camera

Digital camera movies were once a novelty that few cared about. Today, though, they've become a convenient way to record video without lugging around a camcorder. Many current digicams can capture movies with standard TV-screen resolution (640 x 480 pixels), standard TV smoothness (30 frames per second), and sound.

But before iPhoto 5, what could you do with those movies? Earlier versions of iPhoto simply ignored files with extensions like .avi and .mov (the standard file types for digital-camera movies). In iPhoto 5, Apple has corrected that blind spot; the program now cheerfully adds those video files to your library, denoted by a little camcorder icon and duration indicator.

The news isn't quite as good after that, however. iPhoto doesn't provide any tools to edit the video, to combine it with other snippets, or even to watch it. When you double-click an imported movie, iPhoto hands it off to QuickTime Player in a separate window.

Note, too, that when you edit a video in QuickTime Player Pro and hit the Save button, you're actually modifying the original movie file, the one that's stored in iPhoto. iPhoto does not protect you from mistakes, in other words, by creating a backup movie that you can access later with a Revert to Original command. There's no safety net if you ever want to go back to the unedited version.

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Tip: To make your own safety backup before editing a movie, just drag the movie's thumbnail directly out of the iPhoto window and onto the icon of a backup folder on your hard drive. iPhoto spins out a copy ”an original that you can re-import if you decide that your editing was a mistake.

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iPhoto doesn't update the movie thumbnail when you edit and save the file, either. You may have cut out the opening scene of a clip in QuickTime Player Pro ”say, Aunt Betty tripping over the garden hose ”but she'll still be there in your thumbnail library, even though that particular moment of video is now on the cutting-room floor. The only workaround is to save the cleaned-up version to your hard drive, then import it back into iPhoto.