Section 4.5. Four Special Cases: iSight, HDV, USB, and Live Recording

4.5. Four Special Cases: iSight, HDV, USB, and Live Recording

Recorded footage from a MiniDV tape is by far the most popular source of iMovie video, but it's not the only one. iMovie is perfectly content to slurp in video from an iSight camera, from a DV camcorder with no tape in it, or from a high-definition, semi-professional camcorder. (That, after all, is where iMovie HD gets its name . )

Read on.

4.5.1. iSight Video

The Apple iSight is a compact silver tube, about the dimensions of a Hostess Ho-Ho, with a built-in microphone and video camera. Most people buy an iSight (about $150) for use with iChat AV, Apple's chat program, because iSight lets you conduct audio and video chats instead of typed ones.

But as it turns out, the iSight is also a darned fine capture device. No, it doesn't take tapes, so you can't prerecord something. But it's an excellent tool for recording live events directly into iMovie: interviews, meetings, travel adventures with your laptop, and so on.

The steps are almost the same. Start by connecting the iSight's FireWire cable to the Mac. Make sure that the iSight's shutter is open ( turn the ring on the lens). Then continue as shown in Figure 4-8.

4.5.2. Live Camcorder Recording

iMovie is also happy to capture video straight from a camcorder that doesn't contain a tape. In other words, you can use your camcorder as though it were an iSight, sending whatever it "sees" directly into iMovie, live.

Figure 4-8. When you move the Camera/Edit switch into the Camera position, you'll see a tiny down-pointing triangle next to it. From this pop-up menu, choose iSight. At this point, the Monitor window shows whatever the iSight camera is "seeing." Click Record with iSight to begin (and, later, to stop) recording. The video arrives in the Clips pane just like any other footage.

All you have to do is set its selector to Camera instead of VCR and take the tape out of the camcorder. Connect the camcorder to the Mac via FireWire, turn the camcorder on, and voil : live, tapeless video capture.

4.5.3. USB Camcorders

These days, not all camcorders store their video on tape. There's a new breed of super-tiny, pants-pocketable microcorders that are capable of recording high-quality video directly onto memory cards. Panasonic, Fisher, Gateway, and other companies sell such gadgets.

iMovie, for the first time, lets you work with many of these "camcorders, "or at least the ones that record in so-called MPEG-4 Simple Profile format. (You can find out by consulting the box, the Web page, or the manual. )

That's not to say that iMovie actually imports MPEG-4 video the same way it imports MiniDV footage; it doesn't. But when you connect one of these' corders to your Mac's USB jack, the memory card shows up on your screen as though it's a disk. Double-click it to reveal its contents, which include a folder with all your video recordings in it. You can bring them into iMovie by simply dragging their Finder icons into the Movie Track or Clips pane of the open iMovie window.

4.5.4. HDV Camcorders

If Apple's marketing is to be believed, the big news in iMovie HD is the HD part. At its release, iMovie HD was by far the least expensive software capable of importing and editing video from high-definition camcorders. (It's about $750 less expensive than the next contender. )

POWER USERS' CLINIC
HDV, Apple Intermediate Codec, and You

If you've been merrily reading along, learning all kinds of new things about high-definition video, one apparent contradiction in this chapter might already be bugging your subconscious .

First you read that an HDV camcorder stores a full hour of high-definition video on a 60-minute Mini-DV tapea cassette designed to hold 60 minutes of standard-definition video.

And then you read that HDV video takes up three or four times as much hard drive space as standard DV.

Which is it? Does HDV footage take up the same amount of disk space as standard DV, or does it take up much more?

Answer: It takes up much more, unless it's massively compressed. That's the most amazing part of the circuitry in today's HDV consumer camcorders: it manages to compress all of that information in real time, so that it fits in the same amount of tape as standard DV.

Your Mac, however, is not quite as dedicated a machine. Even the fastest Mac wouldn't be able to edit HDV footage in its original, super-compressed form. It'd be like: click to select a clip, wait; scroll to a later place in the clip, wait; hit the Space bar to play it, wait; and so on.

So Apple did something very clever in iMovie HD: when it imports video from an HDV camcorder, it transcodes (converts) the signal into a much more lightly compressed format on your hard drive, using a new, virtually lossless compression scheme called the Apple Intermediate Codec (AIC). Once the footage is safely aboard your hard drive, you can edit it just as easily and quickly as you can regular DV video.

When you export your finished movie back to the HDV camcorder, iMovie reconverts it to the more compressed format that the camcorder expects.

During both of these transfers of videofrom the camcorder, and later back to the camcorderit's the transcoding that takes so much time. That's why importing HDV video isn't a real-time process in iMovie HD.

Now that you understand what transcoding is, here's a tip that exploits your new awareness.

If, during importing, you click the Stop button to stop the tape, iMovie continues transcoding the video it's already stored temporarily on the hard drive, right up until it catches up with the spot on the tape where you stopped . (A progress dialog box appears on the screen during this conversion process.)

But if you end the importing by clicking the Import button (to turn it off), iMovie stops right away. It throws away everything in its buffer, and keeps only what it has already transcoded.

But first, some definitions:

High definition is a new video format that offers as tunning, high-resolution picture, clear enough to make you feel like you're looking out a window and wide enough to show you, in a single camera shot, the pitcher, the batter, and the runner on first.

To see high definition, you need a high-definition TV set (an HDTV). You also need some source of HDTV programming, like an upgraded cable box or a special rooftop antenna.

Orand this is the exciting partyou can film your own. Read on.
HDV camcorders capture the wide, super-clear picture of high definitionon ordinary MiniDV tapes. (HDV isn't a typo. That's the format these camcorders use to store high-def video on a MiniDV tape. )

At the birth of iMovie HD, there were only two HDV camcorders:JVC's GR-HD1 ($1, 700 and dropping) and Sony's much newer , three-chip HDR-FX1 ($3, 300). Neither is what you'd call pocketable, unless perhaps you're the Jolly Green Giant. But for prosumers and independent filmmakers, these camcorders represent an insanely liberating development; until they came along, the least expensive HDTV camcorder cost $40,000.

In general, the process of importing and editing high-def video is exactly like working with any other kind of video. There are, however, a few differences.

Figure 4-9. When you're importing video from an HDV camcorder, everything gets wide and rectangular. Otherwise, though, you should be able to work with it just as you would with standard-definition footage.

The one you'll notice first is the new shape of the iMovie monitor window, and the new shape of the captured clips. As you can see in Figure 4-9, they're wide instead of square. Welcome to the HDTV age, baby.

You'll notice another difference, too, once you start importing: Your Mac probably isn't fast enough to capture this massive amount of data in real time. (Remember, high-definition footage is three or four times as massive as standard DV. )

That's why, if you inspect Figure 4-9 carefully , you'll see the tiny notation "Capturing HD at 1/4 speed" just above the volume slider. This notation changes as the importing process chugs along; it may say "Capturing HD at 1/8 speed" or, if you're lucky, even "Capturing HD at full speed."

Tip: If you make your iMovie window smallersmall enough that the Monitor window is only a quarter its usual sizeyou get much better speed. iMovie, in that case, transcodes the high-def video at only a quarter of its normal size (see the box on page 103), and you get faster, smoother playback and quicker importing. (If your machine is anything slower than a dual-1 gigahertz G4 or G5 processor, in fact, you always get this quarter- sized video, unless you change the Playback settings in iMovie's Preferences dialog box. )

The bottom line, though, is that importing high-def footage isn't a real-time operation, as it is when you import standard-def footage. Even after the camera is finished playing the tape, iMovie takes a few more minutes to catch up; a message on the screen says, "Processing cached HDV data" until the post-processing is complete.

Note: If you want to stop before the end of the tape, note that there's a difference between clicking the Stop button and clicking the Import button; see the box on page 103.

Fortunately, it's worth the wait. Once the HDTV footage is inside iMovie, you can work with it with all the speed and fluidity of standard footage. And when the work is finished, you can export the result to iDVD to burn onto a DVD. No, the result won't be a high-definition disc; it will, however, be a widescreen disc (at your option), which will look absolutely spectacular on a widescreen TV.