Official Site
Sanyo

iMovie '08 Support
This camera is officially supported by iMovie '08.

Video Format
MPEG 4

Storage Media
This camera uses SDHC cards.

Known Issues

• One user reports crashing when iMovie recognizes the camera for import.

So my brother told me my old header was ugly. It was. I put up a less ugly one.

I don't have an AppleTV. I have a DVD player. My in-laws don't have an AppleTV. They, too, have a DVD player. Steve Jobs has an AppleTV. This post is not for him. Here's how you send a movie to iDVD.

First things first
"Send to iDVD" is gone. It left no forwarding address. Last I heard, it ran off with GarageBand. Before it left, however, it trained the Media Browser to take its place. Before you can send a movie to iDVD, you need to send it to the Media Browser. I have already covered the "MB", so head on over there if you haven't yet read that post.

How to send movies to the Media Browser

NOTE: If you want to add chapter markers to your movie before you send it to iDVD, you will need to send your movie through GarageBand instead. That, too, has already been covered.

How to add chapter markers

Send your movie to the Media Browser and make sure to select the highest quality setting available.

Media Browser: Check. Now what?
Now that you have your movie in the media browser, feel free to quit iMovie. You are done with it. Launch iDVD and create the new DVD project or open the one you already made for burning this particular movie.

Within iDVD, there is a new and (slightly) improved Media Browser for getting at your iLife. Get there by clicking the "Media" button in the bottom right corner of your window.

Select the "Movies" button on the top right and open the project you created under the "iMovie" menu option. You will see all the different sizes that you sent to the media browser, ready and waiting.

At this point comes the easiest part of the whole process. Drag the largest size you sent to the media browser and drop it into your iDVD project. That's it. No, really. That's it. Don't believe me? Go to the Project menu and select "Project Info..."

You will probably still see your movie being encoded for DVD. Depending on the size you dropped into the iDVD window, it will probably be called "large.m4v".

Make any of the other changes to your DVD menus and so on. Then burn, baby, burn!

I'm concerned about quality
The quality of this process concerns me, too. What is happening here is your movie is being encoded once by iMovie to get it into the Media Browser and then again by iDVD to get it in the proper format for a DVD. Each step involves a "lossy" encoding, so a little data is lost at each step along the way. However, as long as the video you dragged from the Media Browser into iDVD was better than 480p quality, you'll probably be okay. You can check this by looking under "Dimensions" in the Media Browser and looking at the number after the "x".

I will have to look into the quality issues another day, but if you notice any differences in quality or notice that there are none, please take a moment to tell us about it in the comments.

Everyone burn an extra copy and send it to Steve. Something tells me he still has a DVD player.

For those of us who used to drag the timeline zoom slider so far in iMovieHD that you could see electrons orbit in your video clips, cutting video in iMovie '08 feels something like making an incision with a cannon ball. Making precision edits in iMovie '08 requires a little understanding of video formats and a much better understanding of the new UI. Want to trade in your cannon ball for a scalpel? Here's how.

A little info about video
Most of the video you will work with in iMovie '08 is probably in a format called NTSC and contains the equivalent of 29.97 frames per second. If it doesn't have 29.97 frames per second, then it probably will have less. PAL, for europeans, has 25 frames per second. Videos from your still camera might have as few as 15 frames per second. The reason I bring up framerates is that, as I understand it, the vast, vast majority of editing situations are satisfied as long as you can select each individual frame. There is nothing in between frames to edit, really, so cutting video with precision is a matter of cutting it at the right frame.

Enter the slider
The Project Slider

The Event Browser Slider

And this brings us to the new iMovie zoom slider. The slider actually shows up in two places: first, in your project window; and second, in your event browser. This is an improvement over iMovieHD because the only way to zoom in on video there was to add it to your timeline first. The Event Browser slider allows you to zoom and precisely edit a clip before you drag it to your project.

This new slider feels very different because the old zoom slider moved fluidly. That is, you could zoom in exactly as far as you wanted to. (At least enough to see only about 1.5 seconds of video in the timeline, depending on the size of your iMovie window.) The new slider has preset stops: 1/2 second, 1 sec, 2 secs, 5 secs, 10 secs, 30 secs, and "All". These stops refer to the amount of video that will be represented by a thumbnail. (And this is why iMovie '08 makes thumbnails of all of your video. It basically creates a really small version of a clip and uses that to represent your clip in the application window.) You'll notice that as you drag the slider around, you get more or fewer thumbnails. This is because you are telling iMovie how much video you want inside each thumbnail.

You can see this in action in the following shots:

1/2 Second

5 Seconds

All

Notice how the Five Seconds shot and the All shot have the same number of thumbnails. This is because none of my clips are longer than five seconds. So no matter the zoom setting, individual clips will not be put together by the zoom slider. (Why the thumbnails look different between the two is beyond me.)

Yeah, yeah. How do I edit?
Taking what we know about the slider and what we know about framerates, all this means is that the most precise editing can be done when you select the 1/2 Second view on the slider. If your footage has thirty frames per second, you can put your understanding to the test. Set the zoom slider to 1/2 Second. Then, without clicking, slowly drag your mouse across a clip. (This is called scrubbing.) You will notice that the playhead (the red line) will jump as you slowly scrub. Each jump represents a frame. Within one thumbnail at the 1/2 second setting, you should be able to count about 15 jumps. If you set the slider to 1 second, you would be able to count about 30 jumps, or 25 in PAL-land. (Hehe! "PAL-land is such a friendly place!")

The way you select video by dragging will work the same way. You can see this by clicking on a point in a clip and holding down your mouse button as you drag.

Dragging to select: Point A

Dragging to select: Point B

Point A and Point B are separated by a "jump" in the movement of the mouse, or one frame. If you zoom in to 1/2 second per thumbnail and you pay close attention as you drag, your edits can be just as precise as was possible in any previous version of iMovie.

Remember me? I'm the one who asked how I actually edit.
Once you have selected a range of video, what you do next depends on where you are. If you are adding video from the Event Browser to your project, just drag the selected clip and drop it in. If you are editing within your project, you can trim a clip down to the part you selected. Press Command-B or select "Trim to Selection" from the Edit menu.

You can split a clip, by selecting "Split Clip" from the Edit menu.

Spliting a slip will actually split a clip into three clips. One that comes before the range you selected, one made up of what you selected, and one coming after the range you selected. NOTE: You can no longer split a clip at the playhead, like in older versions of iMovie.

Another very interesting feature is the "Trim..." option in the edit menu. (This is replaced by the "Trim Music..." option that appears if you have a music track selected.) This will show the original video source in the project window and allow you to basically reselect the range you imported from the source clip. I consider this a very handy feature. You can bring it up by pressing Command-R or by selecting "Trim Clip..." in the Edit menu.

What about editing where an audio track comes in?
Editing audio is a whole other bag of chips. In some cases, editing audio works very similarly. What I call "sound bytes," which show up in your project as little green or purple flags sticking out under the video clips, exhibit the same frame-by-frame jumping as you drag your mouse to move or trim them. Not so if you are editing sound in the Trim Music window. In that window as you drag your mouse it is no longer jumping like before. This is because music is not broken into frames like video. Paying close attention to the preview window, you will see that the video is still jumping frame by frame, even though your mouse isn't. Back in the normal project view, if you are dragging a background music track to pin it to a particular point in the video, the dragging (for a reason I cannot discern) becomes much less precise, jumping many frames at a time. This one especially bothers me because sometimes you want a downbeat in the music to coincide with a specific frame in video. Hopefully, as you drag the music track you will be lucky enough to land on the correct frame. Perhaps someone can add a little insight in the comments below. Also, there will be more audio editing posts on the way.

I hope this has been useful. Although video selection and editing is pretty different than in older versions of iMovie, it is no less precise. So grab that scalpel and get cutting!

This is just a quick post to let you know what I am working on. These topics will be covered here over the course of the week:

iLife '06 had the impressive and easy ability to send projects back and forth between the different iApps, so easy in fact it was like playing ping-pong with your project. Adding a custom score? Pop. Send to GarageBand. Dropping it into your blog? Pow. Send to iWeb. Burning it to a DVD?... Sigh. You get the idea.

Among all of the new concepts in iMovie '08, the new Media Browser is one of the most pivotal. iMovie now not only listens to, but talks to other iLife applications through the Media Browser. (For brevity and to sound like an expert, I will be referring to it as the "MB" from now on.) This post covers how the MB works and how to get a movie there.


The Grand Central Station for iLife
The MB operates a lot like its older version. It is used to share media between iLife apps without having to browse through folders to find files. The new MB is much like the old one, with the difference that there is a new iMovie source listed. More importantly, you must export from iMovie to get a movie listed here. Not a big deal, but good to know.

Adding a movie to the Media Browser
Getting a movie into the MB is quite easy. There are only a few things to understand. First, in iMovie go to the Share menu and select "Media Browser..."

Selecting it will bring up this window (Click for larger view):

You will notice that this movie has four different size options available. This is because my source material here is 720p HD. (Pretty high quality.) If your source material is of a lower quality, some of the size options will not be made available. This is because iMovie will not export at a size or resolution greater than your source material. Also notice that the window indicates for which devices a given size is appropriate. One glaring omission here is DVD quality. So you know what size works, standard DVDs can be authored up to 480p quality. Don't worry about this too much, however, since iDVD will scale the video so it fits. Unless hard drive space is too tight, just make sure to always choose the highest quality.

Export may take a long time
Exporting to the MB may take a lot of time, depending on the speed of your computer, the length of the movie, and the quality of the source material and of the export settings. If it doesn't take a long time, it might take a long time. On my older iMac G5, a 16 second movie of 720p video took about five minutes to export to all qualities. That is pretty slow, but my computer is on the slow side too.

Using the MB in other iLife apps
Once you have exported your movie to the MB, you will be able to find it in the MB of iDVD, iWeb, and GarageBand. Your list will look something like this:

Notice that your Event Library is also available. This means unedited footage is already in the MB. No export required. Also notice that once you select a movie in the list, all of the available sizes will be listed below it.

As mentioned above, you generally want to select the highest quality version to work with for iDVD. For iWeb, you may want a lower size version depending on how big of a file you want to put on your site. (Note: Publishing to iWeb and publishing to your .Mac web gallery are different things. The .Mac Web Gallery will upload all available sizes and let the viewer choose his or her desired quality.)

Ch-ch-ch-changes
Now that your movie is in the MB, what happens if you make a change to it? Like an ever vigilant guardian of the MB, iMovie will swoop in at the first change to your movie and give you this:

If you decide to make a change anyway, you will need to re-export your movie to the MB. As long as you don't make changes to your movie, the Share menu will also keep track of it. If you have already sent a movie to the MB, the option to do it again is greyed out. Instead of that, the option to remove it becomes available.

I hope this helps you understand the MB, iMovie, and iLife better. As usual, if you have any comments or questions, please fire away in the comments below.

***There is an update to this post that you can read here:***

How to add chapter markers: an addendum

We all heard Steve say it. "There are some people who still want to make DVDs." Classic. Sometimes I wonder if Steve concurrently lives 5 years in the future through some sort of dimension-straddling thing. It would sure explain a lot.

His statement speaks volumes about why chapter markers are no longer a feature of iMovie. Not living five years in the future and still wanting to make chapter markers? Here's how.

In various discussion forums, people have pointed out that you can still add chapter markers in GarageBand. This does still work and the process will be covered in detail here, mostly because the majority of us never really needed it before.

First, the previous option to send an iMovie to GarageBand has changed quite a bit. There is no longer an option to send a movie straight to GarageBand. Instead, you need to send it to the Media Browser. That is a process covered in this post: How to send movies to the media browser. You will need to send your movie to the media browser before going to GarageBand, and can read about doing it on that post.

Warning! Once you send a movie to the media browser, you will no longer be able to quickly switch back to iMovie to make a quick edit. If you make a change, you will have to re-export your movie. Before you plan on doing chapter markers in GarageBand, you are better off finishing your movie first.

On to GarageBand
Once you have sent a movie to the Media Browser, you will be leaving iMovie for good, so go ahead and close it if you'd like. Launch GarageBand, and when it prompts you for what kind of project to create, create a new podcast episode. (If you have already worked in GarageBand before, it might open an old project when it launches. Just close that project and this window will appear.)

You will need to create a dedicated GarageBand project, which means you will need to name and save it somewhere before you can start working on it. This also means you will want to save this file at least until you have your DVD exactly as you like it. Luckily, there is no export process to move the movie from GarageBand to iDVD. You can jump back to GarageBand, adjust your chapter markers, and send it out to iDVD without waiting minutes for the movie to be re-encoded.

I'm in GarageBand. Now what?
Now that you are in GarageBand, you are ready to add the movie track to your timeline window and get to work. The Media Browser may not be showing right now. You can bring it up by clicking this button:

You can also get to the Media Browser by selecting "Show Media Browser" in the Control menu.

Once you are in it, select the Movies button, then open the iMovie part of your list. Your window will look something like this:

Selecting an iMovie project will show you a list of all the various qualities available for that project.

Because we are sending this to iDVD, choose the highest quality version of your movie. Drag it and drop it into your timeline right into the podcast track. Once you do, you will get this message:

Of course, you aren't doing a podcast, so changing the track to a movie track is no big deal. You will notice that a new audio track has appeared below the movie track. Don't get your hopes up that you can do some detailed audio editing. This track combines all of the audio into one. So unless you get excited by being able to mute all the sound, music, and anything else you added, this track will not do what you wanted.

Now that you have your track in place, you can begin adding chapters. The simplest way to to get the playhead where you want to add a chapter marker and hit the letter "p" on your keyboard. If you would rather click a button, make sure that you have the movie track selected in the timeline, which will give you this at the bottom of the window:

You won't see the red star, but you will see the button. With each added chapter marker, you will notice a yellow diamond at that point in the timeline above. To add another chapter, move the playhead again, hit "p" or click the button again. Rinse and repeat.

Working with chapter markers
Once you have created some chapter markers, you can change their names and their timing. Changing the name is important because those names will import into iDVD. (If you don't like a name, you can still change it in iDVD, but I think setting chapter names is easier to do here.) Setting the timing here is important because you can't simply drag a chapter marker in the timeline to change it. You have to enter the new time in manually. Click on the timecode and set the time you want. You also change the names by clicking on them.

Of course, you can always delete a chapter marker and add a new one in its place. To delete a chapter, highlight the entire chapter marker by clicking on it and press the delete key on your keyboard.

One other important point to make about chapter markers is that if you don't set a custom chapter marker at the very beginning, iDVD will add one for you automatically and will name it "Start". You can prevent this by setting a chapter at the very beginning or you can just delete that chapter once you get into iDVD.

Sending it to iDVD
This is the easiest part of your journey. Go to the Share menu and select "Send to iDVD."

iDVD will launch, automatically create a new DVD project, and place your movie and set up a chapter selection menu just like you used to see when you sent a movie there from iMovieHD.

As is always the case, please share if you have any suggestions, questions, or comments.