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Chapter 1: The DV Camcorder

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To edit video using iMovie, you must first shoot some video, which is why the first three chapters of this book have nothing to do with your iMovie software. Instead, this book begins with advice on buying and using a digital camcorder, getting to know the equipment, and adopting professional filming techniques. After all, teaching you to edit video without making sure you know how to shoot it is like giving a map to a 16-year-old without first teaching him how to drive.

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 video—and that is the real fun of iMovie—you need a digital camcorder. This is a relatively new camcorder format, one that's utterly incompatible with the VHS, S-VHS, VHS-C, or 8 mm tapes you may have filled using earlier camcorder types.

iMovie imports video directly from digital camcorders, but that doesn't mean you can't use all your older footage; Chapter 4 offers several ways to transfer your older tapes into iMovie. But from this day forward, shoot all of your new footage with a camcorder that takes MiniDV tapes. At this writing, you can buy a MiniDV camcorder for as little as $350. (See the end of this chapter for a DV buying guide.)

Selling your old camcorder eases much of the pain of buying a DV camcorder. Remember to transfer your old footage into DV format before you do so, however.

A DV camcorder offers enormous advantages over previous formats.

Section 1.1.1.1: It's smaller

The size of the camcorder is primarily determined by the size of the tapes inside it. A MiniDV cassette (tape cartridge) is tiny, as shown in Figure 1-1, so the camcorders are also tiny.

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Meet Digital Video

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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 video—and that is the real fun of iMovie—you need a digital camcorder. This is a relatively new camcorder format, one that's utterly incompatible with the VHS, S-VHS, VHS-C, or 8 mm tapes you may have filled using earlier camcorder types.

iMovie imports video directly from digital camcorders, but that doesn't mean you can't use all your older footage; Chapter 4 offers several ways to transfer your older tapes into iMovie. But from this day forward, shoot all of your new footage with a camcorder that takes MiniDV tapes. At this writing, you can buy a MiniDV camcorder for as little as $350. (See the end of this chapter for a DV buying guide.)

Selling your old camcorder eases much of the pain of buying a DV camcorder. Remember to transfer your old footage into DV format before you do so, however.

A DV camcorder offers enormous advantages over previous formats.

Section 1.1.1.1: It's smaller

The size of the camcorder is primarily determined by the size of the tapes inside it. A MiniDV cassette (tape cartridge) is tiny, as shown in Figure 1-1, so the camcorders are also tiny.

Figure 1-1: The various sizes of tapes that today's camcorders can accept differ in size, picture quality, and cost. For both home and prosumer filming, the standard-size VHS cassette (back) is nearly extinct. 8 mm and Hi-8 cassettes (right) are extremely popular among people who don't have a computer to edit footage, and are very inexpensive. MiniDV tapes (left), like the ones required by most DV camcorders, are more expensive—but the enormous quality improvement makes them worth every penny.

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Buying a DV Camcorder

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If you already own a DV camcorder, you can safely skip to the next chapter—unless you've always wondered what this or that button on your camcorder does. In that case, surveying the following pages may enlighten you.

Like any hot new technology, DV camcorders started out expensive ($2,500 in 1996) and continue to plummet in price. At this writing, basic models start at $350; prosumer models hover around $2,000; many TV crews are adopting $3,500 models like the Canon XL1 or Sony's high-definition FX1; and the fanciest, professional, commercial-filmmaking models go for $10,000. All of these camcorders are teeming with features and require a thick brochure to list them all.

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

Here, then, are three camcorders not to buy:

• Sony MicroMV. These camcorders 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.
• MPEG-2 camcorders. These palm-sized, USB connectable "camcorders" record onto a memory card instead of tape. But beware the ones that say they use the MPEG-2 video format; they generally don't work with iMovie. (Those that record in the MPEG-4 format, however, are fine.)

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

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Chapter 2: Turning Home Video into Pro Video

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When you turn on the TV, how long does it take you to distinguish between an actual broadcast and somebody's home video? Probably about ten seconds.

The real question is: Howcan you tell? What are the visual differences between professionally produced shows and your own? Apple's advertising claims that a DV camcorder and iMovie let you create professional-quality video work. So why do even iMovie productions often have a homemade look to them?

If you want to learn how to upgrade your filming techniques to make your finished videos look more professional, then this chapter is your ticket.

That's not to say, however, that "professional" alwaysmeans "better." Not every video has to be, or should be, a finished-looking production. There are plenty of circumstances in which homemade-looking video is just fine. In fact, it's exactly what an audience of family members is probably expecting. When watching your footage of a one-of-a-kind scene for which preparation was obviously impossible, such as a baby's first steps or the eruption of a local volcano, rest assured that nobody will be critiquing your camera work.

Furthermore, sometimes amateur-looking video isthe look your professional project calls for. In some movies, filmmakers go to enormous lengths to simulate the effect of amateur camcorder footage. (The color segment of Raging Bull, for example, is designed to look as though it's composed footage shot by a home movie camera.)

In other words, polished-looking video isn't necessarily superior video for every situation. Nonetheless, you should know how to get professional results when you want them; even Picasso mastered traditional, representational drawing before going abstract.

As it turns out, there are a number of discernible ways that home movies differ from professional ones. This chapter is dedicated to helping you accept the camcorder deficiencies you cannot change, overcome the limitations you can, and have the wisdom to know the difference.

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Film vs. Videotape

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There's only one crucial aspect of Hollywood movies that you can't duplicate with your DV camcorder and iMovie: Real movies are shot on film, not video. Film, of course, is a long strip of celluloid with sprocket holes on the edges. It comes on an enormous reel, loaded into an enormous camera. After you've shot it, a lab must develop it before you can see what you've got.

Videotape is a different ball game. As you know, it comes on a cartridge and doesn't have to be developed. Many TV shows, including sitcoms and all news shows, are shot on video.

Visually, the differences are dramatic. Film and videotape just look different, for several reasons:

• Film goes through many transfer processes (from original, to positive master, to negative master, to individual "prints," to movie screen), so it has a softer, warmer appearance. It also has microscopic specks, flecks, and scratches that tell you you're watching something filmed on film.
• Film has much greater resolution than video—billionsof silver halide crystals coat each frame of the film. As a result, you see much more detail than video can offer. It has a subtle grain or texture that you can spot immediately. Furthermore, these specks of color are irregularly shaped, and different on every frame. A camcorder's sensors (CCDs), on the other hand, are all the same size and perfectly aligned, which also affects the look of the resulting image.
• Film is also far more sensitive to color, light, and contrast than the sensors in camcorders, and different kinds of film stock have different characteristics. Hollywood directors choose film stock according to the ambiance they want: One type of film might yield warmer colors, another type might offer sharper contrast, and so on.
• Film is composed of 24 individual frames (images) per second, but NTSC video (Section 3.3.3.1) contains more flashes of picture per second (30 complete frames, shown as 60 alternating sets of interlocking horizontal lines per second). All of that extra visual information contributes to video's hard, sharp look and lends visual differences in the way motion is recorded. This discrepancy becomes particularly apparent to experts when film is

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Film-Technique Crash Course

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The bottom line is that two different issues separate film from video: the technologyand the technique. What you can't change is the look of the basic medium: You're going to be recording onto tape, not film.

If the grain and softness associated with film are crucial to your project, you're not utterly out of luck. With the addition of a 320 video-processing program called Adobe After Effects and a $550 software add-on called CineLook (from DigiEffects), you can get very close to making video look like film. CineLook adds the grain, flecks, and scratches to taped footage, and plays with the color palette to make it look more like that of film. Another popular add-on called CineMotion (from the same company) adds subtle blur processing to make the motionof video look more like film, simulating 24-frames-per-second playback. (Needless to say, few iMovie fans go to that expensive extreme.)

What you can change with iMovie alone, however, is almost every remaining element of the picture. Some of the advice in this chapter requires additional equipment; some simply requires new awareness. Overall, however, the tips in this chapter should take you a long way into the world of professional cinematography.

If you're using a camcorder for the first time, it's important to understand the difference between its two functions: as a camera and as a VCR.

The most obvious knob or switch on every camcorder lets you switch between these two modes (plus a third one known as Off ). These two operating-switch positions may be labeled Cameraand VTR(for Video Tape Recorder), Cameraand VCR, or Recordand Play.

But the point is always the same: When you're in Camera mode, you can record the world; the lens and the microphone are activated. When you're in VTR mode, the lens and the mike are shut down; now your camcorder is a VCR, complete with Play, Rewind, and Fast-Forward buttons (which often light up in VTR mode). When you want to

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Get the Shot

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Rule No. 1: Get the shot.

If you and the camcorder aren't ready when something great happens—whether you're trying to create a Hollywood-style movie with scripted actors or just trying to catch the dog's standoff with a squirrel—then everything else in this book, and in your new hobby, are for naught.

Both human and mechanical obstacles may conspire to prevent you from capturing the perfect footage. Here are some examples:

Your camcorder is only ready when its battery is charged and it's got fresh tape inside. MiniDV cassettes these days cost about $4 apiece (from, for example,www.bhphoto.comor warehouse discount clubs like Costco), so you have no excuse not to have a stack of blanks, at least a couple of which should live in your camcorder carrying case for emergency purposes. If you bite the bullet and buy a box of ten or fifty, you'll save even more money, you won't have to buy any more for quite a while, and you'll be able to keep a couple of spares with the camera.

I'm getting tired of seeing that " clapper" board—it's the iMovie icon, it's the picture that shows up when you choose iMovie → About iMovie, it's the icon of every iMovie document. It's practically the world's most overused symbol. Everybody uses it to symbolize filmmaking. What the heck is that thing?

It's called the slateor clapstick, and they really do use it when they make commercial movies. Using a dry-erase marker, an assistant writes the movie's name, scene number, and date onto this plastic whiteboard (nobody uses chalk on slate anymore). As soon as the camera is rolling, the slate is held in front of the lens and the clapstick on top is slammed shut. The camera photographs the time-code readout (which is generated by the sound-recording equipment) in the top part of the clapper. Only then does the director shout, "And, action!"

The purpose of this exercise is to make editing easier later. Although your camcorder records sound and video simultaneously, the soundtrack for

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Replace the Microphone

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The built-in microphone on your camcorder can't be beat for convenience. It's always there, it's always on, and it's always pointing at what you're filming.

Unfortunately, camcorder microphones have several disadvantages. For example:

• They're usually mounted right on the camera body. In quiet scenes, they can pick up the sound of the camcorder itself—a quiet grinding of the electronic motor, or the sound of the lens zooming and focusing.
• If your subject is farther than a few feet away, the sound is much too faint. The powerful zoom lens on modern camcorders exaggerates this problem. If your subject is 50 feet away, the zoom may make it look as though you're right up close, but the sound still has to come from 50 feet away.

Where's the recording-volume knob on my camcorder?

There isn't one. Modern consumer camcorders use something called automatic gain control(AGC). They set the volume level automatically as you record.

That may sound like a neat feature, but it drives professionals nutty. AGC, in essence, strives to record all sound at exactly the same level. When something is very loud, the AGC circuit quiets it down to middle volume; when something is very soft, the AGC circuit boosts it to middle volume.

Over the years, automatic-gain circuitry has dramatically improved. The electronic boosting or quieting is smoother and less noticeable than it once was. Even some modern camcorders, however, sometimes exhibit the unpleasant side effects of AGC circuitry: Try filming something that's very quiet, and then suddenly clap right next to the microphone. On lesser camcorders, when you play the footage back, you'll hear how the sudden, loud sound made the AGC back off, cutting the volume way down in anticipation of further loud noises. It takes the camcorder several seconds to realize that the surrounding sound is still quiet (and to boost the volume level back up where it had been).

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Limit Zooming and Panning

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In a way, camcorder manufacturers are asking for it. They put the zoom-in/zoom-out buttons right on top of the camcorder, where your fingers naturally rest. That tempting placement has led millions of camcorder owners to zoom in or out in almost every shot—and sometimes even several times withina shot. For the camcorder operator, zooming imparts a sense of control, power, and visual excitement. But for the viewer, zooming imparts a sense of nausea.

In other words, most home-movie makers zoom too much. In professional film and video, you almost never see zooming, unless it's to achieve a particular special effect. (Someday, rent a movie and note how many times the director zooms in or zooms out. Answer: almost never.)

To separate yourself from the amateur-video pack, adopt these guidelines for using the zoom controls:

• The zoom button is ideal for adjusting the magnification level betweenshots, when the camcorder is paused—to set upa new shot. Be conscious of how many times you're using the zoom while the tape is rolling.
• Sometimes you may be tempted to zoom in order to create an establishing shot—to show the entire landscape, the big picture—before closing in on your main subject.
  That's a worthy instinct, but zooming isn't the best way to go from an establishing shot to a closeup. Instead, consider an effect like the extremely effective, more interesting one that opens such movies as Citizen Kane: a series of successive shots that dissolve, one into the next, each closer to the subject than the previous. (See Figure 2-3.) Open with a wide shot that shows the entire airport; fade into a medium shot that shows the exiting masses of people; finally, dissolve to the worried face of the passenger whose luggage has vanished. Naturally, you can't create the fades and dissolves while you're shooting, but it's a piece of cake to add them in iMovie. Your job while filming is simply to capture the two or three different shots, each at a different zoom level.

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Keep the Camera Steady

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Here's another difference between amateur and pro footage: Most camcorder movies are shot with a camera held in somebody's hand, which is extremely obvious to people who have to watch it later. Real TV shows, movies, and corporate videos are shot with a camera that's mounted on a massive rolling base, a hydraulic crane, or a tripod. (There are a few exceptions, such as a few annoying-to-watch Woody Allen movies. However, they were shot with handheld cameras for an artistic reason, not just because it was too much trouble to line up a tripod.)

It's impossible to overstate the positive effect a tripod can have on your footage. Nor is it a hassle to use such a tripod; if you get one that's equipped with a quick-release plate, the camcorder snaps instantly onto the corresponding tripod socket. Tripods are cheap, too. You can buy one for as little as $20, although more expensive tripods have more features, last longer, and are less likely to nip your skin when you're collapsing them for transport.

If the camcorder on the tripod isn't perfectly level, the picture will start to tilt diagonally as you pan (the car will appear to be driving up or down a hill instead of across a flat plain). To prevent this phenomenon, make sure that the camera legs are carefully adjusted—slow and tedious work on most tripods. But on tripods with ball-leveling heads(an expensive feature, alas), achieving levelness takes just a few seconds: Just loosen a screw, adjust the head until it is level, and tighten the screw down again.

Of course, tripods aren't always practical. When you're trying to film without being noticed, when you don't have the luggage space, or when you must start filming immediately, you may have to do without. In those instances, consider one of these alternatives:

• Turn on the image stabilization feature. As noted in Section 1.2.1.5, every modern DV camcorder includes an image stabilization

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Video Lighting: A Crash Course

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Today's camera optics are good, but they're not human eyeballs. Every camera, from your camcorder to professional TV and film models, captures truer color, depth, and contrast if lighting conditions are good. The need for bright light grows more desperate if:

• You record onto videotape instead of film. Video picks up an even smaller range of light and shadow than film, so having enough light is especially important when using your camcorder. A movie whose acting, sound, and dialog are exceptional can be ruined by poor lighting.
• You plan to turn your finished production into a QuickTime movie. If the final product of your video project is to be a QuickTime movie (as described in Part 3), as opposed to something you'll view on TV, you need even morelight.
  The compression software (codecs) that turn your video into QuickTime files do excellent work—ifthe original footage was well lit. When you turn a finished dimiMovie production into a QuickTime movie, you'll notice severe drops in color fidelity and picture quality—and a severe increase in blotchiness.
  This desperate need for light explains why some camcorders have a small builtin light on the front. Unfortunately, such lights are effective only when shooting subjects just a few feet away. Better still are clip-on video lights designed precisely for use with camcorders. Not every camcorder has a shoe—a flat connector on the top that secures, and provides power to, a video light. But if yours does, consider buying a light to fit it. The scenes you shoot indoors, or at close range outdoors, will benefit from much better picture quality.

If your camcorder doesn't have a light attachment, or if you want to get more serious yet, consider deliberately lighting the scene, just like TV and film cinematographers the world over.

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Keep It in Focus

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A camcorder is a camera, just like any other. If its lenses aren't focused on the subject, you wind up with a blurry picture.

In theory, the autofocus feature of every DV camcorder takes care of this delicate task for you. You point the camera, it analyzes the image and adjusts its own lens mechanisms, and the picture comes out in sharp focus. But in practice, the autofocus mechanism isn't foolproof. Camcorders assume that the subject of your filming is the closestobject; most of the time, that's true. But now and then, your camcorder may focus on something in the foreground that isn'tthe intended subject. As a result, what you actually wanted to capture goes out of focus, as Figure 2-6 makes clear.

Figure 2-6: Figure 2-6: When you're filming the school play, somebody's head or hat may confuse the autofocus. When you're filming scenery, a nearby branch may similarly fool it (top). The front bars of zoo cages are also notorious for ruining otherwise great shots of the animals inside them. The only solution is to use manual focus (bottom).

Another autofocus hazard is a solid or low-contrast background (such as a polar bear against a snowy background). The autofocus method relies on contrasting colors in the image. If you're aiming the camcorder at, say, a white wall, you may witness the alarming phenomenon known as autofocus hunting, in which the camcorder rapidly goes nearsighted, farsighted, and back again in a futile effort to find a focus level that works.

Other situations that freak out the autofocus include shooting when it's dark, shooting through glass, filming a subject that's not centered in the frame, and high-contrast backgrounds (such as prison or cage bars, French-window frames, and so on), which compete for the autofocus's attention.

Fortunately, most DV camcorders offer a manual focus

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Video Composition: A Crash Course

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The tips in this chapter so far have been designed to turn you from an amateur into a more accomplished technician. Now it's time to train the artist in you.

Even when shooting casual home movie footage, consider the compositionof the shot—the way the subject fills the frame, the way the parts of the picture relate to each other, and so on. Will the shot be clearer, better, or more interesting if you move closer? What about walking around to the other side of the action, or zooming in slightly, or letting tall grass fill the foreground? Would the shot be more interesting if it were framed by horizontal, vertical, or diagonal structures (such as branches, pillars, or a road stretching away)? All of this floats through a veteran director's head before the camera starts to roll.

As an iMovie-maker, you, unlike millions of other camcorder owners, no longer need to be concerned with the sequence or length of the shots you capture, since you can rearrange or trim your footage all you want in iMovie. Your main concern when filming is to get the raw footage you'll need: you can't touch the composition of a shot once you're in iMovie.

Figure 2-7: For freedom of zooming without worrying about going out of focus, begin by zooming in all the way (top). Then use the focus ring to focus (middle). Now you can zoom in or out to any level, before or during the shot (bottom), and your focus remains sharp all the way.
Be careful, though: Don't zoom in so far that you make the camcorder's digital zoom kick in. Most camcorders zoom in optically (true zoom) for several seconds, and then, as you continue to press the Zoom button, begin the artificial digital zoom that makes the image break up. You can detect the end of the optical zooming in two ways: First, a bar graph in the viewfinder usually identifies the ending point of the true zoom's range. Second, your camcorder may introduce a very short pause in the zooming as it switches gears into digital mode.

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Chapter 3: Special Event Filming

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If all you intend to do with your camcorder is to capture random events of childhood charmingness around the house, you can skip this chapter. Just keep your camcorder lying handy, its battery charged and its tape compartment occupied, and you'll be all set.

Chances are, however, that once you've got the iMovie bug, you may become more inspired. It may occur to you to take your camcorder out of the house—to shoot the school play, your kid's sports game, your cousin's wedding, and so on. Maybe you'll decide to use the camcorder for more serious work, such as transferring your old photos to DV to preserve them forever, creating a family history by interviewing relatives, shooting a documentary, or even making a scripted movie.

Each of these situations can benefit from a little forethought, plus a few tips, tricks, and professional techniques. This chapter is designed as a handbook to help you make the most of these common camcorder-catchable events.

What's great about an interview is that you know it's coming. You've got time to set up your tripod, arrange the lighting, and connect an external microphone, as described in Chapter 2. (Do all of this before your subject arrives, by the way, since nothing makes an interview subject more nervous than having to sit around beforehand, just growing apprehensive.) Because you've got this extra time to plan ahead, there's no reason your interview footage can't look almost identical in quality to the interviews you see on TV.

Chapter 2 describes the basics of good camcorder footage. Well, in an interview situation, the same tips apply. Lighting is important: avoid having the brightest light behind the subject's head. Sound is critical: fasten a tie-clip microphone to your subject's lapel or collar.

Above all, use a tripod. You'll be glad you did, not only because the picture will be stable, thus permitting the audience to get more "into" the subject's world, but also for your own sake. Even the lightest camcorder is a drag to hold absolutely motionless for more than five minutes.

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Interviews

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What's great about an interview is that you know it's coming. You've got time to set up your tripod, arrange the lighting, and connect an external microphone, as described in Chapter 2. (Do all of this before your subject arrives, by the way, since nothing makes an interview subject more nervous than having to sit around beforehand, just growing apprehensive.) Because you've got this extra time to plan ahead, there's no reason your interview footage can't look almost identical in quality to the interviews you see on TV.

Chapter 2 describes the basics of good camcorder footage. Well, in an interview situation, the same tips apply. Lighting is important: avoid having the brightest light behind the subject's head. Sound is critical: fasten a tie-clip microphone to your subject's lapel or collar.

Above all, use a tripod. You'll be glad you did, not only because the picture will be stable, thus permitting the audience to get more "into" the subject's world, but also for your own sake. Even the lightest camcorder is a drag to hold absolutely motionless for more than five minutes.

But interviews offer some additional challenges. If you've ever studied interviews on TV, such as the 60 Minutes interviews that have aired every Sunday night since 1968, you realize that the producers have always thought through these questions:

• What's the purpose of the interview? The answer affects how you shoot the scene. On 60 Minutes, the purpose is often to demonstrate how guilty or shifty the subject is. Bright lights and a black background help to create this impression, as do the ultra-closeups favored by the 60 Minutes crew, in which the camera is zoomed in so tight that the pores on the subject's nose look like the craters on Mars.
  In interviews that aren't designed to be especially incriminating, however, the purpose of the interview is often to get to know the subject better. The setting you choose can go a long way toward telling more of the subject's story. Set the interview somewhere that has some meaning for, or tells something about, your subject. If it's a CEO, shoot it in her office across her handsome mahogany desk; your wide establishing shot will telegraph to your viewers just how magnificent this office is. If it's your grandfather, shoot it in his study or living room, where the accumulated mementos on the end tables suggest his lifetime of experiences. (When possible, get these cutaway and establishing shots before or after the actual interview, so as not to overwhelm your interviewee or waste his time.)

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Music Videos

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Few camcorder endeavors are as much fun as making a music video, whether it's a serious one or a fake one just for kicks.

Of course, your interest in this kind of video technique may depend on your age and taste. But music videos are worth studying, no matter who you are, because they frequently incorporate every conceivable camera trick, editing technique, and shooting style. The day you shoot a music video is the day you can try punching every button on your camcorder, unlocking those weird special effects you've never even tried, and using all the unnecessary zooms you want. Better yet, this is the day when you don't care a whit about microphones or sound. Eventually, you'll discard the camcorder's recorded sound anyway. As you splice your footage together in iMovie, you'll replace the camcorder's soundtrack with a high-quality original recording of the song.

Figure 3-2: Because you have iMovie, you can pull off a fascinating visual stunt that's very common in rock videos: the jumping-flea-musician effect, in which, every few seconds, everybody in the scene blips into a new position (or appears and disappears), sometimes in time to the music. (You're actually creating jump cuts, which you should avoid except when creating special effects like this.) Creating this effect is simple—if your camcorder has a tripod. Just shoot each segment, moving your musicians around when the camera isn't moving. In iMovie, the splices will be exactly as sharp and convincing as they are on MTV (or Bewitched).

Some music videos are lip-synched—that is, the performers pretend that they're singing the words on the soundtrack. Other videos are voice-over, narrative, or experimental videos. In these videos, you don't actually see anybody singing, but instead you watch a story unfolding (or a bunch of random-looking footage). If you decide to create a lip-synched video, take a boom box with you in the field. Make sure it's playing as you film the singers, so that they're lip-synching with accurate timing.

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Live Stage Performances

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Filming a live stage performance, such as a play, musical, concert, or dance, is extremely challenging. It poses four enormous challenges: capturing the sound, getting power, capturing the picture, and getting permission in the first place.

At most professional performances, the management doesn't permit camcorders. Whether union rules, copyright rules, house rules, or simple paranoia is at play, the bottom line is that using a camcorder (or any camera) is usually forbidden.

That leaves you two alternatives: Confine your footage to performances where camcorders are OK, such as the choir concert at the elementary school—or film surreptitiously. (As the size of DV camcorders shrinks year by year, the latter option is becoming ever more popular among people who don't mind flouting the rules.)

When you're filming a performance from the audience, your camcorder gets hopelessly confused. It's programmed to record the closest sounds, which, in this case, are the little coughs, chuckles, and seat-creaks of the audience members around you. The people on stage, meanwhile, come through only faintly, with the hollow echo that comes from recording people who are far away from the microphone. As any camcorder buff who's filmed her kid's school play can tell you, the resulting video is often very unsatisfying.

You have alternatives, but they require some effort. One option is to equip your camcorder with an external microphone—a unidirectional-style one. Mount it on a pole that puts the microphone over the audience's heads.

If the show has its own sound system—that is, if it's miked and amplified—you may be able to snake an external microphone up to the speaker system, so that your camcorder is benefiting from the microphones worn by every actor. Better yet, you can sometimes persuade the management to let you hook up your camcorder to the sound system itself. Connect the cable to the

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Speeches

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What to worry about when filming talks, presentations, and speeches: the sound. Exactly as when filming live stage performances, your camcorder's built-in microphone does a lousy job of picking up a speaker more than 10 feet away. To remedy the problem, use a tie-clip microphone on extension cords, get a wireless mike, or run an external microphone to the loudspeakers (if the talk is amplified) or even directly to the sound system's mixing board.

Otherwise, the only other problem you'll encounter is the question-and-answer session, if there is one. In an auditorium situation, not only will you have a terrible time (because there isn't enough time) trying to train the camera on the person asking the question, but you won't pick up the sound at all. You can only pray that the guest speaker will be smart enough to repeat the question before providing the answer.

Capturing audience reaction shots for use as cutaways is a great idea when you're recording a talk. Splicing these shots into the finished iMovie film can make any speech footage more interesting, and gives you the freedom to edit the speech if necessary.

If your goal is to capture the entire talk, and you've got only a single camcorder, you'll have to get the reaction shots before or after the talk. Don't just pan around to the audience while the speaker is speaking.

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Sports

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Filming sporting events is, in general, a breeze. Most take place outdoors, neatly solving all lighting problems, and the only sound that's important at a sporting event is usually the crowd's reaction, which your camcorder captures exquisitely. Most of the time, you'll be zoomed out all the way, because there's too much motion to worry about closeups. (And when you do want closeups, you'll know exactly when to zoom out again, thanks to the structured nature of most sports. Every baseball play begins the same way, for example.)

If your aim is to film a player for training purposes, or to study a golf swing or tennis stroke as it's played back in slow motion or frame by frame, consider using your camcorder's high-speed shutter feature. When you use this special recording mode, the camcorder records the action in a strange, frame-flashing sort of way. When you play this footage back, you can use the slow-motion or freeze-frame controls on your camcorder with sensational, crisp, clear results.

The high-speed shutter is effective only in very bright, sunny, outdoor light. If you try to use it indoors, outdoors when it's overcast, or in shadow, all kinds of unpleasant side effects result. You may get flickering and stuttering motion, the autofocus feature may stop working, colors may not look right, and the picture in general will seem too dim.

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Photos and Old Movies

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Most people associate video with moving images, but video " slideshows" can be extremely satisfying to watch, especially if you add commentary or music in iMovie, as described in Chapter 8. With a tripod, a music stand, and good lighting, your camcorder is all set to preserve your family photos forever.

If the photos were taken with a digital camera, there's nothing to it: Just import them as described in Chapter 9.

The challenge is what to do about photos that aren't digital—the old kind, the paper kind, the kind you'll confront if you put together a biographical video about anyone who's more than six years old.

Tactic one: Get the old pictures into the Mac using a scanner. As described in Chapter 9, you can then drop them into your iMovie storyboard electronically, without having to mess with lights, focus, tripod, and so on.

Tactic two: Film the photos with the camcorder. Take each photo out of its frame, prop it on a music stand or tape it to the wall, and slip a big black piece of cardboard behind it. Set up the camcorder so that it's directly aimed at the photo (otherwise, the photo may look skewed or distorted when filmed). Use the manual focus on your camcorder, zoom in an appropriate amount, position the tripod and lights so that there's no glare, and begin shooting. If you're getting glare from the photo, use two lights, one on each side of the photo, each at a 45-degree angle to it.

Scanning produces a more professional effect. Still, filming the photos gives you some interesting creative possibilities, like surrounding each photo with meaningful memorabilia, capitalizing on late-afternoon sun slanting in through a window, and so on.

You can transfer slides to your movie in either of two ways:

• Project the slides onto a slide screen or white wall, and then film them with your camcorder. To make the slide's image sharper, put the projector as close as possible to the screen. Position the camera right next to the projector, so that it doesn't wind up filming the projected slide at an angle.

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Weddings

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Ah, weddings! Everybody loves weddings—especially camcorder manufacturers. Talk about once-in-a-lifetime (all right, very-few-times-in-a-lifetime) occasions! What bigger event could there be to drive somebody to buy a camcorder?

If you're just a friend or family member in the audience, you've got no choice about where to position the camcorder. You'll have to shoot from your seat or stand in the back.

But suppose that you're a wedding videographer—or becoming one. (That's an excellent idea, by the way, if you've been thinking about going into business for yourself. You, with your digital camcorder and iMovie, can advertise your superior equipment, lower costs, and greater editing flexibility when compared with all the poor slobs still lugging around older, analog equipment.)

From the videographer's standpoint, weddings are tricky. If you've only got one camcorder, where do you stand during the vows? From the spectators' side, where you can't capture the faces of the bride and groom? Or from the opposite side, where you get the bride and groom, but can't see the scene the way the spectators see it? Here are a few solutions:

• Film the rehearsal. The idea is that later, in iMovie, you can splice in some of this footage as though it were captured with a second camera on the day of the wedding. The rehearsal isn't usually "in costume," of course, so you won't fool anyone with your footage of the bride and groom in their sweatshirts and blue jeans. But the presiding official (minister, rabbi, justice of the peace) may well be in official garb at rehearsal time. At the very least, you can grab some footage of him at the rehearsal. With his lines and reaction shots already in the can, you can spend your time during the actual ceremony standing and filming from behind him.
• Really use a second camera

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Actual Scripted Films

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For a steadily growing subset of camcorder owners, this is the Big Kahuna, the raison d'être, the Main Event: making a real movie, complete with dialog, actors, and a plot. Ever since The Blair Witch Project made $140 million—a movie made by recent film-school grads with a camcorder, no funding, and no Hollywood connections—independent films have become a very big deal.

You can post your homemade movies on the Web sites listed in Chapter 14, where 200 million Internet citizens can watch them. The most popular ones get Hollywood-studio attention. There are even a growing number of film festivals dedicated to showing homemade (usually DV) films. In the sixties, Americans used to say that anyone could grow up to be president. Today, we say that anyone can make a Hollywood movie.

The world, and the library, is filled with books on making traditional movies. However, the process is much more difficult than making the kinds of movies described so far in this chapter. In addition to all of the technique and technical considerations you've read about so far, you now have to worry about plot, scripts, continuity, marketing, actors, characters, costumes, props, sets, locations—and budget. You'll go through these phases of creation:

• Writing the screenplay. Most movies begin with a script—or at the very least, a treatment (a 5- to 30-page prose synopsis of the movie's story line that's usually designed to attract interest from backers).
  If you send your screenplay to Hollywood in hopes of getting it made into a movie, your competition is 250,000 other people every year who also send unsolicited scripts. Like them, you'll get yours back soon enough, too; to avoid being accused of stealing ideas, Hollywood studios don't even open unsolicited scripts. Even if you have a connection to someone who'll look at your screenplay, it won't be taken seriously unless it's prepared using extremely specific page formatting, which you can read about in any of dozens of screenwriting books.

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Chapter 4: Camcorder Meets Mac

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Phase 1 is over. You've captured the raw footage on your camcorder, you've now assembled the ingredients you need, and you're ready to enter the kitchen. Now it's time for Phase 2, the heart of this book: editing your footage on the Mac using iMovie. This chapter introduces you to both iMovie and FireWire, the highspeed cable system that transfers footage from the camcorder to the Mac; gives you a tour of the iMovie window; and walks you through your first transfer.

So far in this book, you've read about nothing but hardware—the equipment. In the end, however, the iMovie story is about software, both the footage as it exists on your Mac and the iMovie program itself.

If you bought a new Mac since January 2006, iMovie 6 is probably already on your hard drive. Open the Macintosh HD icon → Applications folder. Inside is the icon for iMovie itself (called iMovie HD).

Its icon is probably in your Dock, too.

If your Mac didn't come with iMovie HD, you'll have to buy it as part of the $80 iLife '06 software suite, a DVD containing the latest versions of GarageBand, iMovie, iPhoto, iWeb, and iDVD. (It's available from Apple's Web site, or popular Mac mailorder sites like www.macmall.com and www.macwarehouse.com.)

Apple says that iMovie requires a Mac OS X machine (10.3.9 or later, or 10.4.3 or later) with at least 256 MB of memory; a G4, G5, or Intel processor; QuickTime 7.0.4 or later; 10 GB of free hard drive space (for all of iLife), and a screen that can show at least 1024 x 768 pixels. In addition, more memory and a faster processor are always better. (For high-definition video, you need 512 megs of memory and either an Intel chip, a 1-gigahertz G4 chip, or something faster—and that's the bare minimum.)

If you want to transfer footage from your DV camcorder, you also need a Mac with FireWire ports. Of course, iMovie can also edit footage you've copied from a Mac that

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iMovie: The Application

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So far in this book, you've read about nothing but hardware—the equipment. In the end, however, the iMovie story is about software, both the footage as it exists on your Mac and the iMovie program itself.

If you bought a new Mac since January 2006, iMovie 6 is probably already on your hard drive. Open the Macintosh HD icon → Applications folder. Inside is the icon for iMovie itself (called iMovie HD).

Its icon is probably in your Dock, too.

If your Mac didn't come with iMovie HD, you'll have to buy it as part of the $80 iLife '06 software suite, a DVD containing the latest versions of GarageBand, iMovie, iPhoto, iWeb, and iDVD. (It's available from Apple's Web site, or popular Mac mailorder sites like www.macmall.com and www.macwarehouse.com.)

Apple says that iMovie requires a Mac OS X machine (10.3.9 or later, or 10.4.3 or later) with at least 256 MB of memory; a G4, G5, or Intel processor; QuickTime 7.0.4 or later; 10 GB of free hard drive space (for all of iLife), and a screen that can show at least 1024 x 768 pixels. In addition, more memory and a faster processor are always better. (For high-definition video, you need 512 megs of memory and either an Intel chip, a 1-gigahertz G4 chip, or something faster—and that's the bare minimum.)

If you want to transfer footage from your DV camcorder, you also need a Mac with FireWire ports. Of course, iMovie can also edit footage you've copied from a Mac that does have FireWire, or video from one of those pocket-corder things that store the video as files on a memory card or hard drive.

And if you simply want to edit your movies on your Mac, without involving the camcorder—movies taken with a digital still camera, for example—then almost any Mac OS X–compatible machine will do. It doesn't have to have FireWire circuitry.

If you've bought iLife, run its installer and choose which programs you want. When the installer is finished, you'll find an icon called iMovie HD in your Applications folder and in your Dock.

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Connecting to FireWire

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The FireWire jack on the front, side, or back of your computer is marked by a radio-active-looking symbol.

If you intend to edit your own camcorder footage, you'll also need a FireWire cable, like the one shown in Figure 4-1.

Figure 4-1: Plug the larger end of the FireWire cable—the six-pin end, as Apple calls it—into the corresponding jack on the Mac. The tiny end may look almost square, but it fits only in one particular way, thanks to a little indentation on one side. Be gentle with it.

On the other end is a much smaller, squarish plug (the four-pin connector). Plug this tiny end into the FireWire connector on your camcorder, which, depending on the brand, may be labeled "FireWire,""i.Link," or "IEEE 1394."

This single FireWire cable communicates both sound and video, in both directions, between the Mac and the camcorder.

Now, if you plan to transfer video to your Mac from a tape in the camcorder, you should turn the camcorder to its VCR or VTR mode.

Occasionally, you may even want to capture live video into iMovie—to pass whatever your camcorder lens is seeing directly to the Mac, wit