| The FireWire connection between your Mac and your camcorder runs both ways, enabling you to write data back to the tape. To export to the camera: 1. | Switch your camcorder to Play/VCR/VTR mode and make sure you're not recording over existing footage on the tape. | 2. | If you want to export only a few clips from your movie, select them in the Timeline (but also see the first tip, below). | 3. | Choose Video Camera from the Share menu; or press Command-Shift-E and click the Videocamera icon at the top of the dialog (Figure 15.1). Figure 15.1. The Videocamera tab of the Share dialog includes controls for setting up the camcorder and adding black frames.
| 4. | If you want some black frames before or after your movie, enter numbers in the two Add fields. This gives you some extra time on the tape and tends to look more professional than just launching into the movie from the beginning. | 5. | Click the box labeled Share selected clips only to export the range you selected in step 2. Otherwise, ignore this step. | 6. | Click the Share button to begin exporting (Figure 15.2). When it's finished, iMovie automatically stops the camera. Figure 15.2. Exporting to camera requires the same amount of time as your movie's length. |
Tips | | Unfortunately, a bug in iMovie 6.0.2 currently prohibits exporting selected clips. Hopefully it will be fixed soon. To ensure that you get a smooth export to tape, quit all other running applications. iMovie hogs the processor when exporting, which can lead to stuttered playback (and therefore recording) to the tape. When sharing selected clips, you must select a contiguous set (all connected and in order on the Timeline). If your movie contains clips that are slow motion, reversed, or still photos, iMovie must render them before exporting to the tapea dialog appears asking if you want to render those clips. Rendering significantly improves their display. However, if you're just looking for some test footage, click the Proceed Anyway button to export the movie without rendering (Figure 15.3). Figure 15.3. iMovie alerts you if any of your clips need to be rendered before exporting the movie to tape.
The rendered clips above can get de-interlaced, resulting in poor image quality when viewed on a television. Try proceeding without rendering and testing the results. For some suggested workarounds, go to www.jeffcarlson.com/imovievqs/im6/rendering.html. When you export HDV footage from iMovie to the camera, be prepared for quite a wait. As I explained in Chapter 7, iMovie transcodes the HDV format to Apple Intermediate Codec (AIC) during the import process, which is why you'll see a lag between what's playing on the camera's LCD screen and what appears in iMovie's Monitor. To go back to the camera, iMovie transcodes from AIC to HDV, and then writes the video to tape. This iMovie-to-camera lag is much longer than importing, because the Mac is doing all the MPEG-2 video compression, not the dedicated chip built into the camera. In my testing, for example, a 1-minute movie took 6 to 8 minutes to export to the camera on a dual-2.5 GHz Power Mac G5, and over 20 minutes on a 1.25 GHz PowerBook G4.
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Tape Backup Exporting your footage to tape serves another important function: providing a backup of your work. Even a modest iMovie project will swamp many backup capacities (such as DAT tape systems) due to the sheer number of gigabytes needing to be backed up. Instead, export your movie to DV tape. In the event that you suffer a hard disk crash (trust me, it's not a fun experience), you won't have your iMovie project, but you'll be able to re-import the edited footage and not lose all of your work. |
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