I have a Sony DCR-SR200 camcorder with a lot of home movies on it. I decided it was time to get the movies onto the computer to edit them and free up some space on the camcorders 40GB hard drive. Getting the movies into iMovie 08 is incredibly easy. Just launch iMovie and plug in the camcorder, select the clips and import. It’s so much faster than my old DV camcorder where importing a movie was real time. After using iMovie a little more each time I learn some new stuff and I thought I would share.
I am running out of space on my notebooks hard drive and as you know raw video footage takes up some room. So if you have an external hard drive, connect the hard drive before you start iMovie and you can import to the external hard drive. Also, you can move imported events to an external hard drive by:
1. Open iMovie
2. Change the view in the Events window to View Events by Volume. You can do this by clicking the Volume icon to the right of Event Library or by right-clicking in the Event Library and selecting it.
3. Open the volume where your events are stored. Select it and drag it to the volume you want to store it in. This puts the event at the root of the volume in an iMovie Events folder.
This is great if you have a notebook like me.
I also learned how to capture a still from the video, just place the playhead on the frame you want, right-click and select Add still to project. This was a feature I liked in iMovie HD but did not know how to do in 08. It’s also very easy just to drag and drop titles and transitions into the project.
The more I use iMovie 08 the more I am coming to like it. I was like all the other naysayers when the new iMovie appeared, iMovie HD was fine and I was comfortable using it. Give iMovie 08 a try, play around with it, you might be surprised.
If you have any tips, tricks or questions let me know.
