iMovie 6 & iDVD: The Missing Manual

Exporting Troubles

Now suppose that you’re able to edit the video successfully, and even edit it into a masterful work of art. The big moment arrives: You’re ready to play the movie back onto the tape, or export it as a QuickTime movie, so that you can then play it for friends and venture capitalists. Here are a few things that can go wrong.

You Live in Europe

If you bought your DV camcorder in Europe, it has probably been, as the Internet punsters say, " nEUtered.” That is, it’s been electronically rigged so that it can’t record video from a FireWire cable.

Your PAL-format camcorder isn’t broken. In fact, it’s simply the victim of a European law, enacted under pressure from the motion picture industry, that any camcorder that can accept a video input signal is, technically speaking, a video recorder, not a camera. Video recorders are subject to a huge additional tax. Camcorder manufacturers, in an attempt to keep their consumer product line inexpensive, responded by taking out the digital-input feature from the built-in software of inexpensive DV and Digital8 camcorders. (More expensive DV camcorders don’t have this problem.)

If you’re clever with electronics, you can surf the Web in a quest for black market Web sites that explain how to un-disable FireWire recording—a simple procedure involving a technician’s remote-control unit. Video repair shops in many European cities will perform this task for a small fee, too (but don’t expect to see ads for this service). Otherwise, you have ...