Apple Brings Movies to a Desk Near You
What could be better than reminiscing over hours of unedited home videos? Just about anything. But there’s good news for everyone with a finite life span and a family history of camcorders: The latest Macs make editing video easy.
What used to require five figures’ worth of gear and a rat’s nest of cables can now be done on a $999 iMac DV and its bundled Apple iMovie software.
The catalyst behind this video revolution is the miniDV video format, whose tiny cassettes store as much as an hour of tack-sharp video and stereo sound. Unlike other camcorder formats, a DV camcorder stores your scenes digitally, translating them into a stream of bits even as you pan across a scene of unopened holiday presents.
The digital approach improves image and sound quality and enables you to make copies of the original tape with no loss of quality. And it dramatically simplifies getting video into the Mac--you need only transfer those bits from the camcorder to your hard drive.
That’s where FireWire comes in. FireWire jacks are built into every current desktop Mac except for the entry-level, $799 iMac. For portable production, you’ll find FireWire on the $1799 iBook Special Edition and the latest PowerBook models. FireWire is also built into every miniDV camcorder, though it sometimes goes by the names IEEE 1394 and Sony iLink.
A single, slender cable connects the Mac to a DV camcorder and carries both video and audio. The iMovie software controls your camcorder during the video-capture process, stashing incoming clips on an on-screen shelf.
You then edit clips and sequence them by dragging them to a timeline, adding music from your CD collection and creating titles and scene transitions as you go. When you’ve finished, a few mouse clicks send your efforts back out to tape.
The DV and FireWire combination makes video editing easier than ever, but camcorder compatibility is key: Some miniDV camcorders don’t support the FireWire standard correctly and thus don’t get along with iMovie. Canon and Sony sell the broadest range of compatible cameras, while JVCs generally don’t work with iMovie.
I get perfect results with a Canon Elura, which sells for about $1,300. Before buying a DV camcorder, check Apple’s compatibility list at https://www.apple.com/imovie/shoot.html.
Another potential problem is disk space--or the lack of it. One minute of DV-format video inhales 220 megabytes, and a 45-minute movie will fill most of an iMac DV’s 10 gigabyte hard drive. One solution is to edit in chunks: Create, say, 10 minutes of your movie, export it to tape, delete its work files from your hard drive, then move on to the next segment.
Or just expand your Mac’s storage capacity. For less than $500, you can replace an iMac’s 10 GB or 20 GB hard drive with one that holds 45 GB or more. Or keep your internal hard drive and add an external FireWire-based drive, such as VST Technologies’ $449 20 GB FireWire Hard Drive. You generally can’t use a FireWire hard drive to capture video from a DV camcorder--most Macs aren’t fast enough to simultaneously control a FireWire camcorder and hard drive--but you can use the FireWire drive to free up space on your internal drive or hold your video project’s work files.
IMovie can also save your final project as a QuickTime movie that you can e-mail or publish on a Web site. If you go this route, you’ll get much better image quality if you shoot and edit with the limitations of Web video in mind. Minimize motion, use a tripod, avoid zooming and use scene transitions sparingly. When shooting indoors, turn on all room lights, or better still, invest in a video light, reflective umbrella and light stand. Bright lighting minimizes the video noise that can make Web video look grainy and jerky.
DV and FireWire aren’t just for home Hitchcocks, of course. TV producers are embracing broadcast-quality miniDV camcorders such as Canon’s $4,500 XL1. And professional-oriented editing programs, such as Apple’s $999 Final Cut Pro and Adobe’s $599 Premiere, provide far more editing controls and special effects than iMovie.
*
Jim Heid is a contributing editor of Macworld magazine.
