13.4. Importing Camcorder FootageSuppose you've opened iMovie and clicked the Create a New Project button. At this moment, then, you're looking at an empty version of the screen shown in Figure 13-3. Connect your camcorder to the FireWire cable and turn it on. This is where the fun begins. Click the little movie-camera symbol on the iMovie screen, if necessary, to switch into Camera Mode, as shown in Figure 13-4.
Tip: If you turn on your camcorder after iMovie is already running, the program conveniently switches into Camera Mode. (iMovie only does so the first time you power up the camcorder during a work session, however, to avoid annoying people who turn the camcorder on and off repeatedly during the editing process to save battery power.) The Monitor window becomes big and blue, filled with the words "Camera Connected."At other times, it may say,"Camera No Tape,""Camera Fast Forward,""Camera Rewinding," and so on. Now you can click the Play, Rewind, Fast Forward, and other buttons on the screen to control the camcorder (see Figure 13-4). You'll probably find that you have even more precise control by using the mouse to control the camcorder than you would by pressing the actual camcorder buttons. (The Space bar turns the Import button on and off, as described below. Otherwise, though, no keyboard shortcuts control these buttons .) Tip: The Rewind and Fast Forward buttons work a little strangely. If you double-click a button, playback stops and the rewinding or fast-forwarding begins at full speed. If you click and hold your mouse button down on a Rewind or Fast Forward button, playback continues with the tape moving at only twice its usual speed. What you're doing now, of course, is scanning your tape to find the sections that you'll want to include in your edited movie. 13.4.1. The Monitor Window's Video QualityAfter reading all the gushing prose about the high quality of digital-video footage, when you first inspect your footage in the Monitor window, you might wonder if you got ripped off. The picture may not look anything like DVD quality. This video quality is temporary and visible only on the Mac screen. The instant you send your finished movie back to the camcorder, or when you export it as a QuickTime movie or DVD, you get the stunning DV quality that was temporarily hidden on the Mac screen. Still, you'll spend much of your moviemaking time watching clips play back, so it's well worth investigating the different ways iMovie can improve the picture:
13.4.2. Capturing FootageWhen you're in Camera Mode, an Import button appears just below the Monitor window. When you click this button (or press the Space bar), iMovie imports the footage you're watching, storing it as digital-video movie files on the Mac's hard drive. You can ride the Space bar, tapping it to turn the Import button on and off, capturing only the good parts as the playback continues (Figure 13-4). During this process, you'll notice some changes to your iMovie environment:
If you click Import (or press the Space bar) a second time, the tape continues to roll, but iMovie stops gulping down footage to your hard drive. Your camcorder continues to play. You've just captured your first clip(s). 13.4.2.1. Automatic scene detectionIf you let the tape continue to roll, you'll notice a handy iMovie feature at work. Each time a new scene begins, a new clip icon appears in the Clips pane. The Clips pane scrolls as much as necessary to hold the imported clips. What iMovie is actually doing is studying the date and time stamp that DV camcorders record into every frame of video. When iMovie detects a break in time, it assumes that you stopped recording, if only for a moment, and therefore that the next piece of footage should be considered a new shot. It turns each new shot into a new clip. This behavior lets you just roll the camera, unattended, as iMovie automatically downloads the footage, turning each scene into a clip while you sit there leafing through a magazine. Then later, at your leisure, you can survey the footage you've caught and set about the business of cutting out the deadwood. In general, this feature doesn't work if you haven't set your camcorder's clock. (JVC's high-definition camcorders are the exception; they don't time-stamp your footage, but iMovie does recognize their scene breaks anyway.) Automatic scene detection also doesn't work if you're playing from a non-DV tape using one of the techniques described on Section 13.9. Tip: If you prefer, you can ask iMovie to dump incoming clips into the Clip Viewer at the bottom of the screen instead of the Clips pane. You might want to do that when, for example, you filmed your shots roughly in sequence. That way, you'll have to do much less dragging to the Clip Viewer when it comes time to edit.To bring this about, choose iMovie Preferences and click Import. Where you see "Place clips in," click Movie Timeline. Click OK. Now when you begin importing clips, iMovie stacks them end to end in the Timeline instead of on the Clips pane. Preferences, click import, and proceed as shown in Figure 13-5.
Once you've turned off the automatic clip-creation feature, iMovie logs clips only when you click Import (or press Space) once at the beginning of the clip, and again at the end of the clip. Tip: Tapping the Space bar is the same as clicking the Import button. In fact, if you tap Space when the camcorder is stopped, it begins to play and iMovie begins to capture the footage. 13.4.2.2. The maximum clip lengthiMovie veterans are used to a clip-length limit of 9 minutes, 28 seconds, and 17 frames (which is 2 gigabytes of hard drive space). But no more; in iMovie HD, a clip's length is limited only by the amount of space on your hard drive. You can easily import an entire 60-minute DV tapeif you've got enough hard drive space, of courseas a single icon on your Clips pane, if you like. (That would require, of course, that you've turned off automatic scene detection as described earlier.) 13.4.2.3. The Free Space readoutAs noted earlier, the Free Space display (Figure 13-4) updates itself as you capture your clips. It keeps track of how much space your hard drive has leftthe one onto which you saved your project. This readout includes a color -keyed early warning system that lets you prepare for that awkward moment when your hard drive's full. At that moment, you won't be able to capture any more video. Look at the color of the text just beside the Trash (where it says, for example, "1.83 GB available"):
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