That, for your trivia pleasure, is the standard frame rate for North American television. (All right, 29.97 frames per second see the box in Section 12.4.1.3.) In other words, iMovie counts like this: 00:28…00:29…1:00…1:01.Ĭamcorders record life by capturing 30 frames per second. Time code (the frame counter) counts up to 29 before flipping over to 00 again-not to 59 or 99, which might feel more familiar.

Second, remember that there are 30 frames per second (in NTSC digital video 25 in PAL digital video). First, computers start counting from 0, not from 1, so the very first frame of a clip is called 00:00. Getting used to this kind of frame counter takes some practice for two reasons. For example, if it says 1:23:10, then the clip is 1 minute, 23 seconds, and 10 frames long.

Minutes:seconds:frames.” You can see this little timer ticking upward as the clip grows longer. Superimposed on the clip, in its upper-left corner, is the length of the clip expressed as ' Its icon is a picture of the first frame. That’s a clip-a single piece of footage, a building block of an iMovie movie. The only difference is that you paid about $99,000 less for your setup.Īs soon as you click Import, what looks like a slide appears in the first square of theĬlips pane, as shown in Figure 4-5. This is exactly the way professionals edit digital video. The camcorder, still connected to the Mac via its FireWire cable, passes whatever you’d see in the Monitor window straight through to the TV set, at full digital-video quality. That way, you get to edit your footage not just at full quality, but also at full size. The ultimate editing setup, though, is to hook up a TV to your camcorder’s analog outputs. (You hear the audio only through the camcorder, too.)īest. In other words, if you’re willing to watch your camcorder’s LCD screen as you work instead of the onscreen Monitor window, what you see is what you shot-all gorgeous, all the time.

An even better solution is to choose iMovie → Preferences, click Playback, and turn on “Play DV project video through to DVĬamera.'You’ve just told iMovie to play the video through your camcorder. They’re cited so frequently in this book that it’s probably worth memorizing its keyboard shortcut: ⌘-comma.Īs a bonus, that keystroke works to open the Preferences dialog box in all of the other iLife programs, too, not to mention Microsoft Word, Keynote, Safari, and others.īetter. IMovie’s Preferences dialog box contains a slew of useful options.

Record video imovie external camera