Section 13.1. Meet Digital Video

13.1. Meet Digital Video

Technically speaking, you don't need a camcorder to use iMovie. You can work with QuickTime movies you find on the Web, or use it to turn still photos into slideshows.

But to shoot your own videoand that is the real fun of iMovieyou need a digital camcorder. This is a relatively new camcorder format, one that's utterly incompatible with the tapes you may have filled using earlier camcorder types like VHS, S-VHS, VHS-C, 8mm, and Hi-8. At this writing, MiniDV camcorders cost about $400 for a basic modeland prices continue to sink, month by month.

The size of the camcorder is primarily determined by the size of the tapes inside it. A MiniDV cassette (tape cartridge) is tiny, so the camcorders are also tiny. Yet the quality is astounding; as you can see in the following table, DV quality blows every previous tape format out of the water. (All camcorders, TVs, and VCRs have the same vertical resolution; this table measures horizontal resolution, the number of tiny horizontal stripes of color the playback uses to fill your TV screen.):

Table 13-1.

Tape Format	Maximum Lines of Resolution
VHS, VHS-C	240
8mm	280
Live TV broadcast	300
S-VHS, Hi-8	400
Digital satellite broadcast	400
MiniDV	500
HDTV	720 or 1080

DV's 16-bit sound quality is dramatically better than previous formats, too. In fact, it's better than CD-quality sound, since DV camcorders record sound at 48 kHz instead of 44.1 kHz. (Higher means better.)

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Tip: Most DV camcorders offer you a choice of sound-quality modes: 12-bit or 16-bit. The lower quality setting is designed to leave "room" on the tape for adding music after you've recorded your video. But avoid it like the plague! If you shoot your video in 12-bit video, your picture will gradually drift out of sync with your audio trackif you plan to save your movie to a DVD. Consult your manual to find out how to switch the camcorder into 16-bit audio mode. Do it before you shoot anything important.

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Digital video has another big advantage, too: You can copy it from DV camcorder to DV camcorder, or from DV camcorder to Mac, dozens of times, making copies of copies of copies. The last generation of digital video will be utterly indistinguishable from the original footagewhich is to say, both will look fantastic.

For that reason, although DV tapes may deteriorate over a decade or two, just as traditional tapes do, you won't care. Long before the tape has crumbled, you'll have transferred the most important material to a new hard drive or a new DV tape or to a DVD. Because quality never degrades when you do so, you'll glow with the knowledge that your grandchildren and their grandchildren will be able to see your movies with every speck of clarity you see todayeven if they have to dig up one of those antique "Macintosh" computers or gigantic, soap- sized "DV camcorders" in order to play it.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION
Two Camcorders Not to Buy

In their never-ending quest to come up with smaller and cooler camcorder designs, electronics manufacturers have already gone well beyond the MiniDV format. Unfortunately, some of these alternative formats are incompatible with iMovie.

Here, then, are two camcorders not to buy:

• Sony MicroMV . These camcorders are tiny, all right: they store their footage on a tape the size of a matchbox. Too bad they record in a format that popular editing programs like iMovie don't recognize.

• DVD camcorders . Sony, Panasonic, and Hitachi offer camcorders that use miniature DVD discs instead of tapes. Neat, but no FireWire jack.

iMovie HD can now edit video from two camera categories that iMovie 4 couldn't: high-definition footage and palmsized, USB-connectable "camcorders" that record onto a memory card instead of tape (Section 13.4).

Otherwise, though, stick to MiniDV camcorders. They're inexpensive, their quality is spectacular, and you won't be left behind when the next camcorder-format fad passes .