Chapter 15. Recording Back to Tape

15. Recording Back to Tape

Your movie is finished! Now what?

While it's feasible that you could transport your Mac (especially if it's a laptop) to every location where someone might see your movie, that plan runs into a few snags when you want to share your masterpiece with grandparents in Humboldt or your sister in South Africa. Fortunately, getting completed footage out of iMovie is almost as simple as bringing raw footage in.

One method is to export the movie back to a MiniDV tape in your camcorder. The best reason for this approach is that you maintain the same high quality that came from the camera in the first placeexporting to the Web or iDVD compresses the footage and degrades the image, even if it's not easily perceived (one exception to this is HDV video, which is compressed back into the MPEG-2 based HDV format, but the quality is still pretty darn good).

The camera also stores the footage in digital format, so you'll have a copy saved off your computer that retains the same level of quality as what you edited. This is handy in case you need to make a backup of your work so far, or for when you want to hook your camcorder up to a television to show the movie.