Saving Your Video


Once a video is finished (a finished version is in the project folder; Finished_Project11.mov), it can be distributed for the enjoyment of others and the deep satisfaction of the creator. iMovie provides a number of avenues of distribution, but before turning your attention to sharing, you should explore the most important output option availablecreating an archive.

Unlike music, video is remarkably large relative to typical hard-disk storage capacity. At 5 minutes of video per gigabyte, finished video in even a small collection can overwhelm a typical Mac. Consequently, archiving video is imperative. While it's great to be able to burn DVDs and CD-ROMs, put videos on the Internet, and even email them, all of these methods are for distributionthey take the high quality of your digital video and squeeze it down to fit into a given format. The quality of a true archive needs to be as high as you can manage; the perfect archive for your videos is back in the digital videotape format from which they came.

Ideally, you'll have a special videocassette allocated for only finished videos, so they don't get taped over or lost among the hours of video you shoot. Lesson 8 mentions some specifics for organizing and labeling tapes, but for now let's just say you have a master cassette onto which you plan to record your video before you remove it from your Mac.

The process of getting video from iMovie to your camcorder is straightforward.

1.

Connect your camcorder to your Mac using your FireWire cable.

2.

Make sure your tape is in your camera and is cued up to the spot where you want to add video.

Of course, your camcorder must be turned on and set to playback (VCR) mode.

3.

From within iMovie, go to File > Share.

This will open the Sharing window, which displays a number of options.

4.

Click the Videocamera button.

5.

Click Share, as the default settings are appropriate for most situations.

Tip

Although there is nothing wrong with placing "bookends" on your videos of 1 second of black to space them out (professionals sometimes refer to this material as "handles"), 5 or even 10 seconds is also appropriate and gives you some room to breathe.

iMovie takes control of your camera from this point. As long as you are cued up to the right spot on the tape, iMovie will put your camera into Record mode and then start playing the video. You may want to have your LCD swiveled out so you can see the video while it's being recorded. When iMovie is done, it stops the recording process.

6.

To check the videotape, rewind it and watch the video to make sure the recording was successful and that there were no technical snafus along the way.

7.

When you're done checking the tape, recue it to a spot in the black material that follows the recording.

By always starting to record over these black pieces of "leader," you guarantee that timecode will count continuously. This also gives you a moment to make sure you're not going to record over something you didn't mean to.

Tip

If you are serious about your video work, it is often a good idea to save an additional copy of your video without music. Delete the music track, and make a recording to your DV tape. Then you can undo the music deletion and save your project with it there. The point of having a version without music is simply that once the music and the rest of the video are merged together on tape, they are harder to separate should you ever want to reedit the video (making it shorter, for instance, or combining parts with other videos to make longer movies), or if one day you decide the music is wrong for the project. For many reasons, it can be a good practice for advanced users.


Now that a copy of your video is in DV format and is safely back on tape, you can output other formats of your video for distribution. Eventually, you can delete the project and media from your computer, knowing that if you need to you can bring the project back into your Mac for new output options or a little reediting.



    Apple Training Series(c) iLife 05
    Apple Training Series: iLife 05
    ISBN: 032133020X
    EAN: 2147483647
    Year: 2005
    Pages: 141
    Authors: Michael Rubin

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