iLife '04: The Missing Manual

Chapter 19. Finding Your Audience

It’s conceivable that, like the perpetual student who’s never quite ready for the real world, you enjoy editing your movies so much, you don’t ever want to finish up. Most people, however, use iMovie with a single goal: finishing and exhibiting the completed video before a live audience.

Fortunately, iMovie’s powerful Share command offers a huge number of exporting possibilities. You can send your movie back to your camcorder, where it appears in all its original, high-resolution glory. You can dub it down to a VHS tape. You can burn it as a DVD. Or you can leave it in the realm of computers by posting it on a Web page, sending it by e-mail, or exporting it as a QuickTime movie. This chapter covers all of these possibilities.

Exporting to Tape

You might want to send your finished product back to the camcorder for any number of reasons. For example:

To Watch It on TV

Once your iMovie creations are back on the camcorder’s DV tape, you can then pass them along to a television. To pull this off, you must connect the camcorder to your TV, using an S-video cable (if possible) or regular RCA phono cables (if not).

Tip

If your TV is very old, it may not have auxiliary input jacks of either type. In that case, plug your camcorder into the VCR’s auxiliary inputs instead. It will patch the signal through to the TV.

To Transfer It to Your VCR

The glorious thing about DV tape, of course, is that its picture quality and sound quality are sensational. Unfortunately, most ...