iMovie 6 & iDVD: The Missing Manual

USB Camcorders

These days, not all camcorders store their video on tape. There’s a new breed of super-tiny, pants-pocketable microcorders that are capable of recording high-quality video directly onto memory cards. Panasonic, Fisher, Sanyo, and other companies sell such gadgets.

iMovie lets you work with many of these “camcorders,” or at least the ones that record in so-called MPEG-4 Simple Profile format. (You can find out by consulting the box, the Web page, or the manual.)

Figure 4-8. What happens if you have both a camcorder and an iSight camera?When you move the Camera/Edit switch into the Camera position, you see a tiny down-pointing triangle next to it. From this pop-up menu, choose which camera you want to use.At this point, the Monitor window shows whatever iMovie is “seeing.” If you’ve selected iSight or Built-in iSight, the button that’s normally labeled Import now says Record With iSight. Click it to begin (and, later, to stop) recording. After a pause for processing, the video arrives in the Clips pane just like any other footage.

That’s not to say that iMovie actually imports MPEG-4 video the same way it imports MiniDV footage; it doesn’t. But when you connect one of these ‘corders to your Mac’s USB jack, the memory card shows up on your screen as though it’s a disk. Double-click it to reveal its contents, which include a folder with all your video recordings in it. ...