By David Pogue
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Table of Contents

Chapter 1: A Field Guide to Camcorders

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To edit video using iMovie, you must first shoot some video, which is why the first three chapters of this book have nothing to do with your iMovie software. Instead, this book begins with advice on buying and using a camcorder, getting to know the equipment, and adopting professional filming techniques. After all, teaching you to edit video without making sure you know how to shoot it is like giving a map to a 16-year-old without first teaching him how to drive.

In previous editions of this book, "digital camcorder" meant only one thing: digital tape camcorders—MiniDV cassette camcorders. But since 2005 or so, the camcorder industry has radically changed. Sales of tape camcorders have plummeted. People are using their digital still cameras to record video, and leaving their bigger, heavier, less spontaneous camcorders at home.

The camcorder industry has responded by trying to make their new models smaller, lighter, cheaper—and unshackled by the limitations of tape (like waiting to rewind). Nowadays, camcorders can record onto built-in hard drives (just like the ones in iPods); onto removable memory cards (just like the ones in digital cameras); or onto miniature, burnable blank DVDs.

Fortunately, iMovie '08 can import and edit the video from almost all of these new camcorder types. Unfortunately, embracing one of these new camcorder formats means sacrificing some features and picture quality along the way.

This chapter guides you through the ever-more-complicated jungle of camcorder types, their pros, and their cons.

Technically speaking, you don't need a camcorder to use iMovie. You can work with QuickTime movies you find on the Web, or use it to turn still photos into slideshows.

But to shoot your own video—and that's the real fun of iMovie—you need a camcorder.

If your video is on tapes in one of the really old analog formats, like VHS, S-VHS, VHS-C, or 8mm, see . But from this day forward, shoot all of your new footage with a digital camcorder like one described in this chapter. You'll gain a whole new world of convenience, picture quality, and footage longevity.

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Meet Digital Video

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Technically speaking, you don't need a camcorder to use iMovie. You can work with QuickTime movies you find on the Web, or use it to turn still photos into slideshows.

But to shoot your own video—and that's the real fun of iMovie—you need a camcorder.

If your video is on tapes in one of the really old analog formats, like VHS, S-VHS, VHS-C, or 8mm, see . But from this day forward, shoot all of your new footage with a digital camcorder like one described in this chapter. You'll gain a whole new world of convenience, picture quality, and footage longevity.

One thing all current camcorders have in common: They all record video and audio digitally, recording it on that tape/hard drive/memory card/DVD as a series of computer files. A digital camcorder therefore offers enormous advantages over previous formats.

The size of the camcorder is primarily determined by the size of whatever it records onto. A MiniDV cassette (tape cartridge) is much smaller than the old VHS camcorders, as shown in , for example, and memory-card camcorders can be smaller still.

Figure : How's this for a tech museum? The standard-size VHS cassette (back) is nearly extinct. 8mm and Hi-8 cassettes (right) are fading fast. MiniDV tapes (left), like the ones required by most digital camcorders, are the highest quality, least expensive format, but even their popularity is fading.

Small size has lots of advantages. You can film surreptitiously when necessary. Small camcorders don't make kids or interview subjects nervous like bulkier equipment. The batteries last a long time, because they've got less equipment to power. And, of course, smaller means the camera is easier to take with you.

Video quality is measured in lines of resolution, the number of tiny horizontal stripes of color the playback uses to fill your TV screen. As you can see by this table, digital camcorders blow every previous tape format out of the water.(All camcorders, TVs, and VCRs have the same vertical resolution; this table measures horizontal resolution.)

Tape Format	Maximum Lines of Resolution
VHS, VHS-C	240

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What's It Good For?

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If you're reading this book, you probably already have some ideas about what you could do if you could make professional-looking video. Here are a few possibilities that may not have occurred to you. All are natural projects for iMovie:

• Home movies. Plain old home movies—casual documentaries of your life, your kids' lives, your school life, your trips—are the single most popular creation of camcorder owners. Using the suggestions in the following chapters, you can improve the quality of your footage. And using iMovie, you can delete all but the best scenes (and edit out those humiliating parts where you walked for 20 minutes with the camcorder accidentally filming the ground bouncing beneath it).
  This, too, is where iMovie '08's Internet smarts come into play. Instead of burning and shipping a DVD of your home movies, you can shoot the finished product up to a Web page or You Tube, where your lucky, lucky family and friends can enjoy them.
• Web movies.But why limit your aspirations to people you know? This is the You Tube Era, dude. If you've got something funny or interesting on "film," why not share it with the Internet population at large? In iMovie '08, You Tube is only one menu command away—and that's just the beginning. New film festivals, Web sites, and magazines are springing up everywhere, all dedicated to independent makers of short movies.
• Business videos.It's very easy to post video on the Internet or burn it onto a cheap, recordable CD or DVD, as described in Part3. As a result, you should consider video a useful tool in whatever you do. If you're a real estate agent, blow away your rivals (and save your clients time) by showing movies, not still photos, of the properties you represent. If you're an executive, quit boring your comrades with stupefying PowerPoint slides and make your point with video instead.
  Video photo albums. A video photo album can be much more exciting, accessible, and engaging than a paper one. Start by filming or scanning your photos. Assemble them into a sequence, add some crossfades, titles, and music. The result is a much more interesting display than a book of motionless images, thanks in part to iMovie's Ken Burns effect (). This emerging video form is becoming very popular—videographers are charging a lot of money to create such "living photo albums" for their clients.

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Tape vs. Tapeless

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If you already own a camcorder, you can safely skip to the next chapter. If you're in the market for a new one, though, you can consider the rest of this chapter a handy buying guide.

For years, when you said "camcorder," it was understood that you meant "tape camcorder." And, to be sure, the least expensive and most popular camcorder type today (by a hair) records onto tape: MiniDV cassettes.

The popularity of digital tape camcorders is crashing, however. Their sales have been declining 10 to 15 percent a year.

As you can imagine, these numbers are causing some consternation at the headquarters of Sony, Canon, and other camcorder makers. What's going on? Don't people want to preserve memories of their lives anymore?

As best they can tell, the problem is the cassettes themselves. They're too hard to find in the drawer when the neighbors want to see the highlights of your latest vacation, and it takes too long to rewind and fast-forward.

What the world wants, the camcorder manufacturers have decided, is random access: the ability to jump directly to any scene without having to wait. In theory, a tapeless camcorder also saves you time when transferring the video to your computer for editing, because you don't have to play the video from the camcorder in real time. The video files are stored on memory card, hard drive, or DVD as regular computer files, which you should be able to simply drag and drop onto your Mac's hard drive. (In practice, it doesn't quite work out that way—see —but you get the idea.)

That's why the industry has been flooding the stores with tapeless camcorders:cameras that record onto memory cards, onto hard drives, or onto little DVDs—anything but tape.

Unfortunately, at least at this writing, few tapeless camcorders offer the incredible video quality of MiniDV camcorders. In order to store a reasonable amount of video onto that tiny memory card, hard drive, or DVD, the camera must compress it to an alarming degree, using less information to describe each frame of video. Video recorded onto MiniDV tapes, on the other hand, is essentially uncompressed. What you see on playback is what the camera recorded.

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High Definition

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A growing number of camcorders film in gorgeous, widescreen, ultrasharp high definition. The video looks absolutely incredible when viewed on an HDTV set. Your own life looks like it was filmed by a Hollywood movie crew.

If you're shopping for a camcorder now, you should seriously consider going to high-def right now. High-definition camcorders are available in both tape and tapeless models. The really cool thing about the tape models, in fact, is that they record onto ordinary MiniDV cassettes, exactly the same ones used by regular tape camcorders. The signal recorded on these tapes is different, of course—it's in a format called HDV—but you still gain the convenience and economy of those ordinary drugstore tapes ().

Figure : High-def camcorders like the Canon HV20 record onto ordinary MiniDV tapes. The image quality, however, is anything but ordinary.

High-def camcorders cost more than standard-definition models. But it's worth paying the premium, because high definition is the video format of the future; sooner or later, the transition to HD will be complete. You may as well start filming your life in high definition now, because in a few years, standard definition will look as quaint as daguerreotype photographs.

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AVCHD, MPEG-2, and Other Such Jargon

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The new generation of tapeless camcorder stores video as ordinary computer files—on DVD, hard drive, or memory card—that you can copy to your Mac and edit in iMovie. But what are those files? Every computer document is some format, whether JPEG (the usual format for photos) or TXT (text files). What format are these video files?

Some digital camcorders, especially old ones, record in formats called MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and MPEG-4. (The abbreviation stands for Motion Picture Experts Group, the association of geeks who dream up these standards.) iMovie '08 recognizes and imports MPEG-2—usually. Unfortunately, there are multiple flavors of MPEG-2, and iMovie doesn't recognize all of them.

iMovie can also work with the movies created by most digital still cameras, like. MOV, .AVI, and MPEG-4 files. Here again, though, your mileage may vary.

It's worth repeating: If you're tempted to buy a certain camcorder, but you're not sure if iMovie works with it, Google it.

The good news is that iMovie '08 also recognizes AVCHD, which is already the most popular file format for high-definition tapeless camcorders. (It stands for Advanced Video Coding/High Definition, and yes, it's an annoying acronym. Do they really think they're going to make video editing more attractive by dreaming up names like this?)

Anyway, AVCHD is a high-def format concocted by Sony and Panasonic in 2006, and is now available on camcorders from Sony, Panasonic, Canon, and Samsung. This format offers roughly the same video quality as MPEG-2 or MPEG-4, but takes up even less space on your camcorder's memory card, miniDVD, or hard drive.

As it turns out, AVCHD is the same as H.264, which is the video format as Blu-ray high-definition DVD discs (and also the format of videos from the iTunes Store).That's a handy feature for people who own both an AVCHD camcorder that records onto miniature DVDs and a Blu-ray DVD player (or Playstation 3), because you can pop the DVD right out of the camcorder and into the Blu-ray player to play on your TV.

That's the good news. The bad news is that AVCHD still takes up a lot of space; a DVD camcorder of this type holds only 15 minutes of best-quality video per disc. (On the newer double-sided discs and camcorders that accept them, you get 27 minutes.)

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Camcorder Features: Which Are Worthwhile?

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Like any hot new technology, digital camcorders started out expensive ($2,500 in 1996) and continue to plummet in price. At this writing, basic models start at $300; prosumer models hover around $1,500; many TV crews are adopting $2,800 models like the Canon XL2 or Sony's high-definition FX7; and the fanciest, professional, commercial-filmmaking models go for $7,000 or more. All of these camcorders are teeming with features and require a thick brochure to list them all.

So how do you know which to buy? Here's a rundown of the most frequently advertised camcorder features, along with a frank assessment of their value to the quality-obsessed iMovie fan.

As you read, you'll encounter one slightly depressing trend: Some of the handiest little features that were once standard are missing from the latest camcorder models. That's because, in an effort to prop up sagging camcorder sales, camcorder companies have been stripping away features to cut costs and lower prices. Among the features they're deleting: FireWire jacks; microphone inputs; headphone jacks; analog inputs; and a Backlight button.

FireWire connector

FireWire is Apple's term for the tiny, compact connector on the side of most MiniDV tape camcorders. When you attach a FireWire cable, this jack connects the camera to your Mac. Other companies have different names for this connector—you may see it called IEEE-1394, i.Link, DV In/Out, or DV Terminal.

On tapeless camcorders, FireWire jacks are usually missing altogether. That's OK; you have other ways to get your video off the camcorder and onto the Mac, as described in .

Analog inputs

This single feature may be important enough to determine your camcorder choice by itself. Analog inputs are connectors on the camcorder () into which you can connect older, pre-DV equipment, such as your VCR, your old 8mm camcorder, and so on.

Unfortunately, this is one of those features that the camcorder makers have been quietly eliminating in an effort to shave costs. That's too bad, because there's no easier, less expensive method of transferring older footage into your digital camcorder—or directly into iMovie.

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Where and How to Buy

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Most of the usual electronics suspects make camcorders these days, including Sony, Panasonic, JVC, Samsung, Sanyo, Hitachi, and Canon. Each company releases a new line of models once or twice a year; the feature list always gets longer, the price always gets lower, and the model numbers always change.

Cameras come in all sizes, shapes, and price ranges (see ). In magazine reviews and Internet discussion groups, Sony and Canon get consistently high marks for high quality. Still, each manufacturer offers different exclusive goodies, and each camcorder generation improves on the previous one.

Figure : The model lineup changes constantly, and new formats come and go. Here, for example, are three 2007-era digital camcorders.
Top left: This Panasonic high-def camcorder records onto memory cards in AVCHD format.
Top right: JVC pioneered the hard-drive camcorder in its Everio series.
Bottom: Pros and semi-pros, however, are still using tape. In the right camcorder, like this semi-pro model from Sony, the results are stunning.

To look over a company's latest camcorders, start by reading about them at the relevant Web site:

• Sony. Visit www.sonystyle.com, and then navigate your way to the Handycam Camcorders page.
• Canon. Go to www.canondv.com to view the various models.
• Panasonic. Start at Panasonic.com and burrow your way in through Consumer Electronics, or just use this shortcut: http://tinyurl.com/ywm42h.
• JVC. These camcorders' headquarters are at http://camcorder.jvc.com.

Camcorders, as it turns out, are famous for having hopelessly unrealistic list prices. The high-definition Sony FX7, for example, has an official price tag of $3,500, but you can find it online for less than $2,500.

Once you've narrowed down your interest, then, go straight to a Web site like www.shopper.com to see what the real-world price is. Such Web sites specialize in collecting the prices from mail-order companies all over the world. When you specify the camcorder model you're looking for, you're shown a list of online stores that carry it, complete with prices. (All of the prices in this chapter came from listings on those Web sites.)

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The Long-Term Storage Problem

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No matter which kind of camcorder you choose, you have more to consider than just features and prices; you have the future to consider. Every kind of camcorder types presents serious challenges if you hope to preserve your video for future generations.

• DVD camcorders. Nobody has yet figured out how long those home-burned DVDs actually last. They don't last essentially forever, as Hollywood DVDs do. In Hollywood, they stamp DVDs, pressing a pattern into the plastic. Home DVD burners, though, record a pattern in a layer of organic dye on the bottom of the disc—a dye that can take between several weeks and several decades to break down.
• Memory-card and hard-drive camcorders. Once the card or drive is full, you're finished shooting for the day. The camcorder is worthless until you offload the video to a computer, thereby freeing up space to continue shooting.
  But what then? Are you going to burn hour after hour of captured video onto DVDs? Not only is that practically a full-time job, but then you're stuck with those homemade DVDs and their questionable lifespan.
  You could, of course, just keep the video on hard drives, even though that's a very expensive and bulky solution. Here again, though, you have to wonder: Will the hard drive you buy today still be functioning 50 years from now?
• Tape camcorders. Digital tapes may deteriorate over a decade or two, just as traditional tapes do.

The solution to all of these problems, of course, is simple vigilance. Every 10 or so years, you'll have to copy your masterworks onto newer tapes, discs, hard drives, or whatever the latest storage format happens to be.

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Chapter 2: Turning Home Video into Pro Video

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When you turn on the TV, how long does it take you to distinguish between an actual broadcast and somebody's home video? Probably about 10 seconds.

The next question is: How can you tell? What are the visual differences between professionally produced shows and your own? Apple's advertising claims that a digital camcorder and iMovie let you create professional-quality video work. So why do even iMovie productions often have a homemade look to them?

If you want to learn how to upgrade your filming techniques to make your finished videos look more professional, then this chapter is your ticket.

That's not to say, however, that "professional" always means "better." Not every video has to be, or should be, a finished looking production. There are plenty of circumstances in which homemade-looking video is just fine. In fact, it's exactly what an audience of family members is probably expecting. When watching your footage of a one-of-a-kind scene for which preparation was obviously impossible, such as a baby's first steps or the eruption of a local volcano, rest assured that nobody will be critiquing your camera work.

Furthermore, sometimes amateur-looking video is the look your professional project calls for. In some movies, filmmakers go to enormous lengths to simulate the effect of amateur camcorder footage. (The color segment of Raging Bull, for example, is designed to look as though it's composed footage shot by a home movie camera.)

In other words, polished-looking video isn't necessarily superior video for every situation. Nonetheless, you should know how to get professional results when you want them; even Picasso mastered traditional, representational drawing before going abstract.

As it turns out, there are a number of discernible ways that home movies differ from professional ones. This chapter is dedicated to helping you accept the camcorder deficiencies you cannot change, overcome the limitations you can, and have the wisdom to know the difference.

There's only one crucial aspect of Hollywood movies that you can't duplicate with your DV camcorder and iMovie: Real movies are shot on

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Film vs. Videotape

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There's only one crucial aspect of Hollywood movies that you can't duplicate with your DV camcorder and iMovie: Real movies are shot on film, not video. Film, of course, is a long strip of celluloid with sprocket holes on the edges. It comes on an enormous reel, loaded into an enormous camera. After you've shot it, a lab must develop it before you can see what you've got.

Videotape is a different ball game. As you know, it comes on a cartridge and doesn't have to be developed. Many TV shows, including sitcoms and all news shows, are shot on video.

Visually, the differences are dramatic. Film and videotape just look different, for several reasons:

• Film goes through many transfer processes (from original, to positive master, to negative master, to individual "prints," to movie screen), so it has a softer, warmer appearance. It also has microscopic specks, flecks, and scratches that tell you you're watching something filmed on film.
• Film has much greater resolution than video—billions of silver halide crystals coat each frame of the film. As a result, you see much more detail than video can offer. It has a subtle grain or texture that you can spot immediately. Furthermore, these specks of color are irregularly shaped, and different on every frame. A camcorder's sensors (CCDs), on the other hand, are all the same size and perfectly aligned, which also affects the look of the resulting image.
• Film is also far more sensitive to color, light, and contrast than the sensors in camcorders, and different kinds of film stock have different characteristics. Hollywood directors choose film stock according to the ambiance they want: One type of film might yield warmer colors, another type might offer sharper contrast, and so on.
• Film is composed of 24 individual frames (images) per second, but NTSC video () contains more flashes of picture per second (30 complete frames, shown as 60 alternating sets of interlocking horizontal lines per second). All of that extra visual information contributes to video's hard, sharp look and lends visual differences in the way motion is recorded. This discrepancy becomes particularly apparent to experts when film is

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Film-Technique Crash Course

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The bottom line is that two different issues separate film from video: the technology and the technique. What you can't change is the look of the basic medium: You're going to be recording onto tape, not film.

If the grain and softness associated with film are crucial to your project, you're not utterly out of luck. With the addition of a 320 video-processing program called Adobe After Effects and a $550 software add-on called CineLook (from DigiEffects), you can get very close to making video look like film. CineLook adds the grain, flecks, and scratches to taped footage, and plays with the color palette to make it look more like that of film. Another popular add-on called CineMotion (from the same company) adds subtle blur processing to make the motion of video look more like film, simulating 24-frames-per-second playback. (Needless to say, few iMovie fans go to that expensive extreme.)

What you can change with iMovie alone, however, is almost every remaining element of the picture. Some of the advice in this chapter requires additional equipment; some simply requires new awareness. Overall, however, the tips in this chapter should take you a long way into the world of professional cinematography.

If you're using a camcorder for the first time, it's important to understand the difference between its two functions: as a camera and as a VCR.

The most obvious knob or switch on every camcorder lets you switch between these two modes (plus a third one known as Off). These two operating-switch positions may be labeled Camera and VTR (for Video Tape Recorder), Camera and VCR, or Record and Play.

But the point is always the same: When you're in Camera mode, you can record the world; the lens and the microphone are activated. When you're in VTR mode, the lens and the mike are shut down; now your camcorder is a VCR, complete with Play, Rewind, and Fast-Forward buttons (which often light up in VTR mode). When you want to film a movie, use Camera mode; to watch the movie you've recorded, put the camcorder into VTR mode. (You'll also have to put the camera in VTR mode when it comes time to record your finished iMovie creation, or when you want to copy video to or from another camcorder or VCR.)

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Get the Shot

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Rule No. 1: Get the shot.

If you and the camcorder aren't ready when something great happens—whether you're trying to create a Hollywood-style movie with scripted actors or just trying to catch the dog's standoff with a squirrel—then everything else in this book, and in your new hobby, are for naught.

Both human and mechanical obstacles may conspire to prevent you from capturing the perfect footage. Here are some examples:

Your camcorder is only ready when its battery is charged and it's got fresh tape or free space inside. MiniDV cassettes these days cost about $4 apiece (from, for example, www.bhphoto.com or warehouse discount clubs like Costco); blank miniDVDs are about $7. If you bite the bullet and buy a box of 10 or 50, you'll save even more money, you won't have to buy any more for quite a while, and you'll be able to keep a couple of spares with the camera.

If you have a hard-drive or memory-card camcorder, you can't exactly buy more recording space at a drugstore. Planning ahead is part of the game with these machines.

Professional broadcast journalists never go anywhere without fully charged batteries and blank tape in the camera. Even if you're not a pro, having enough tape and power at all times can pay off, since you can make good money selling your video to news shows because you caught something good on tape.

The same goes for battery power. The battery that comes with the camcorder is adequate as a starter battery, but buying a second one—especially if it's one of the fat, heavy, longer-capacity batteries—is further insurance that some precious shooting opportunity won't be shut down or lost by equipment failure.

Remember, too, that today's lithium-ion batteries are extraordinarily sophisticated. But even though they're rechargeable, they're not immortal; most can be recharged only a few hundred times before you start to notice a decrease in capacity. In other words, use the power cord whenever it's practical.

Camcorder batteries are far more fragile than they appear. Keep them dry at all costs. If one gets damp or wet, you may as well throw it away.

There's a human element to being ready, too. For example, remember that from the moment you switch on the power, your camcorder takes about 8 seconds to warm up, load a little bit of tape, and prepare for filming. It's a good idea to flip the power on, therefore, even as you're running to the scene of the accident, earthquake, or amazing child behavior.

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Replace the Microphone

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The built-in microphone on your camcorder can't be beat for convenience. It's always there, it's always on, and it's always pointing at what you're filming.

Unfortunately, camcorder microphones have several disadvantages. For example:

• They're usually mounted right on the camera body. In quiet scenes, they can pick up the sound of the camcorder itself—a quiet grinding of the electronic motor, or the sound of the lens zooming and focusing.
• If your subject is farther than a few feet away, the sound is much too faint. The powerful zoom lens on modern camcorders exaggerates this problem. If your subject is 50 feet away, the zoom may make it look as though you're right up close, but the sound still has to come from 50 feet away.

"Camcorder sound," that hollow, faraway sonic quality present on most home videos (including the ones shown on your cable station's public-access channel late at night), is one of the most obvious differences between amateur video and professional work. Even if viewers can't quite put their finger on how they know that something was shot with a camcorder, they'll know that it was shot with a camcorder just by listening.

Few camcorder accessories, therefore, are more useful than an external microphone. And it doesn't have to cost a lot. (See .)

Of course, if the problem of camcorder audio is that it gets worse when the subject is far away, an external microphone with a six-foot cord isn't of much use. Therefore, consider buying a couple of extension cords for your microphone; they come in lengths of 20 feet or more, and cost about $10. You can plug one into the next, using standard miniplug connectors (like the ones on the end of Walkman headphones).

In certain situations, plugging one cable into the next, as you do when connecting an external microphone to an extension cable, can introduce a hum on your soundtrack. To avoid ruining otherwise great footage, carry with you a pair of cheap Walkman headphones. Whenever you're using an external microphone, plug these headphones into the headphone jack on your camcorder and listen as you film. (In fact, you're wise to use headphones

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Limit Zooming and Panning

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In a way, camcorder manufacturers are asking for it. They put the zoom-in/zoom-out buttons right on top of the camcorder, where your fingers naturally rest. That tempting placement has led millions of camcorder owners to zoom in or out in almost every shot—and sometimes even several times within a shot. For the camcorder operator, zooming imparts a sense of control, power, and visual excitement. But for the viewer, zooming imparts a sense of nausea.

In other words, most home-movie makers zoom too much. In professional film and video, you almost never see zooming, unless it's to achieve a particular special effect. (Someday, rent a movie and note how many times the director zooms in or zooms out. Answer: almost never.)

To separate yourself from the amateur-video pack, adopt these guidelines for using the zoom controls:

• The zoom button is ideal for adjusting the magnification level between shots, when the camcorder is paused—to set up a new shot. Be conscious of how many times you're using the zoom while the tape is rolling.
• Sometimes you may be tempted to zoom in order to create an establishing shot—to show the entire landscape, the big picture—before closing in on your main subject.
  That's a worthy instinct, but zooming isn't the best way to go from an establishing shot to a closeup. Instead, consider an effect like the extremely effective, more interesting one that opens such movies as Citizen Kane: a series of successive shots that dissolve, one into the next, each closer to the subject than the previous. (See .) Open with a wide shot that shows the entire airport; fade into a medium shot that shows the exiting masses of people; finally, dissolve to the worried face of the passenger whose luggage has vanished. Naturally, you can't create the fades and dissolves while you're shooting, but it's a piece of cake to add them in iMovie. Your job while filming is simply to capture the two or three different shots, each at a different zoom level.
• You don't have to avoid zooming altogether. As noted above, professional moviemakers rarely zoom. One of the exceptions, however, is when the director wants to pick one face out of a crowd, often just as some horrific realization is dawning. Furthermore, when you're filming somebody who's doing a lot of talking, a very slow, almost imperceptible zoom is extremely effective, especially if you do it when the speech is getting more personal, emotional, ominous, or important.

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Keep the Camera Steady

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Here's another difference between amateur and pro footage: Most camcorder movies are shot with a camera held in somebody's hand, which is extremely obvious to people who have to watch it later. Real TV shows, movies, and corporate videos are shot with a camera that's mounted on a massive rolling base, a hydraulic crane, or a tripod. (There are a few exceptions, such as a few annoying-to-watch Woody Allen movies. However, they were shot with handheld cameras for an artistic reason, not just because it was too much trouble to line up a tripod.)

It's impossible to overstate the positive effect a tripod can have on your footage. Nor is it a hassle to use such a tripod; if you get one that's equipped with a quick-release plate, the camcorder snaps instantly onto the corresponding tripod socket. Tripods are cheap, too. You can buy one for as little as $20, although more expensive tripods have more features, last longer, and are less likely to nip your skin when you're collapsing them for transport.

If the camcorder on the tripod isn't perfectly level, the picture will start to tilt diagonally as you pan (the car will appear to be driving up or down a hill instead of across a flat plain). To prevent this phenomenon, make sure that the camera legs are carefully adjusted—slow and tedious work on most tripods. But on tripods with ball-leveling heads (an expensive feature, alas), achieving levelness takes just a few seconds: Just loosen a screw, adjust the head until it is level, and tighten the screw down again.

Of course, tripods aren't always practical. When you're trying to film without being noticed, when you don't have the luggage space, or when you must start filming immediately, you may have to do without. In those instances, consider one of these alternatives:

• Turn on the image stabilization feature. As noted on , every modern camcorder includes an image stabilization feature, which magically irons out the minor jiggles and shakes associated with handheld filming. Using electronic/digital (as opposed to optical) image stabilization drains your battery faster, so feel free to turn it off when you're using a tripod. But at all other times, the improvement in footage is well worth the power sacrifice.

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Video Lighting: A Crash Course

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Today's camera optics are good, but they're not human eyeballs. Every camera, from your camcorder to professional TV and film models, captures truer color, depth, and contrast if lighting conditions are good. The need for bright light is even more critical on today's consumer camcorders than it is on film, because video picks up an even smaller range of light and shadow. A movie whose acting, sound, and dialog are exceptional can be ruined by poor lighting.

This desperate need for light explains why some camcorders have a small built-in light on the front. Unfortunately, such lights are effective only when shooting subjects just a few feet away. Better still are clip-on video lights designed precisely for use with camcorders. Note very camcorder has a shoe—a flat connector on the top that secures, and provides power to, a video light. But if yours does, consider buying a light to fit it. The scenes you shoot indoors, or at close range outdoors, will benefit from much better picture quality.

If your camcorder doesn't have a light attachment, or if you want to get more serious yet, consider deliberately lighting the scene, just like TV and film cinematographers the world over.

Going to this extreme isn't always necessary, of course. If it's just you filming the New Year's Eve party, you're better off not asking the revelers to sit down and be quiet while you set up the lights. But when you're conducting interviews, shooting a dramatic film, making a video for broadcast, or making a QuickTime movie for distribution on a CD, lights will make your footage look much better.

The following discussion is dedicated to illuminating those more important filming situations. When you want the very best footage, lit the way the pros would light it, the following guidelines, theory, and equipment suggestions will serve you well indeed.

(If you're just shooting kids, relatives, or animals indoors, at least turn on every light in the room.)

Cinematographers spend entire careers studying the fantastically complex science of lighting. Here's what they worry about.

Exposure

Exposure refers to light—the amount of illumination the camera picks up. When the scene is too dark, you lose a lot of detail in dark shadows. Worse, your camcorder's AGC (Automatic Gain Circuit, the video equivalent of the audio-leveling circuitry described in the previous section) tries to amplify the available light. The result, which you can see for yourself by filming in dim light, is video

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Keep It in Focus

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A camcorder is a camera, just like any other. If its lenses aren't focused on the subject, you wind up with a blurry picture.

In theory, the autofocus feature of every modern camcorder takes care of this delicate task for you. You point the camera, it analyzes the image and adjusts its own lens mechanisms, and the picture comes out in sharp focus. But in practice, the autofocus mechanism isn't foolproof. Camcorders assume that the subject of your filming is the closest object; most of the time, that's true. But now and then, your camcorder may focus on something in the foreground that isn't the intended subject. As a result, what you actually wanted to capture goes out of focus, as makes clear.

Another autofocus hazard is a solid or low-contrast background (such as a polar bear against a snowy background). The autofocus method relies on contrasting colors in the image. If you're aiming the camcorder at, say, a white wall, you may witness the alarming phenomenon known as autofocus hunting, in which the camcorder rapidly goes nearsighted, farsighted, and back again in a futile effort to find a focus level that works.

Other situations that freak out the autofocus include shooting when it's dark, shooting through glass, filming a subject that's not centered in the frame, and high-contrast foregrounds (such as prison or cage bars, French-window frames, and so on), which compete for the autofocus's attention.

Figure : When you're filming the school play, somebody's head or hat may confuse the autofocus. When you're filming scenery, a nearby branch may similarly fool it (top). The front bars of zoo cages are also notorious for ruining otherwise great shots of the animals inside them. The only solution is to use manual focus (bottom).

Fortunately, most camcorders offer a manual focus option: a switch that turns off the autofocus. Now you can (and must) set the focus by hand, turning a ring around the lens (or pushing + and − buttons) until the picture is sharp.

If neither you nor your subject has any intention of moving during the shot, that's all there is to manual focus. Moving shots are trickier, because as the distance between you and your subject changes, you may not have time to fiddle with the focus ring. The best approach is to keep the camera zoomed out all the way as you pan to track the action.

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Video Composition: A Crash Course

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The tips in this chapter so far have been designed to turn you from an amateur into a more accomplished technician. Now it's time to train the artist in you.

Even when shooting casual home movie footage, consider the composition of the shot—the way the subject fills the frame, the way the parts of the picture relate to each other, and so on. Will the shot be clearer, better, or more interesting if you move closer? What about walking around to the other side of the action, or zooming in slightly, or letting tall grass fill the foreground? Would the shot be more interesting if it were framed by horizontal, vertical, or diagonal structures (such as branches, pillars, or a road stretching away)? All of this floats through a veteran director's head before the camera starts to roll.

As an iMovie-maker, you, unlike millions of other camcorder owners, no longer need to be concerned with the sequence or length of the shots you capture, since you can rearrange or trim your footage all you want in iMovie. Your main concern when filming is to get the raw footage you'll need: You can't touch the composition of a shot once you're in iMovie.

You'll hear film professionals talk about three kinds of camera shots: wide, medium, and close ():

• When you're zoomed out all the way, so that the camera captures as wide a picture as possible, you're using a wide shot. Wide shots establish context. They show the audience where we are and what's going on. Wide shots make great establishing shots, but they can also reveal a lot about the scale and scope of the action even after the scene has begun. (There's a famous crane shot in Gone With the Wind that starts on a medium shot of Scarlett O'Hara and then moves up and wide as she walks through a compound filled with hundreds of dying confederate soldiers to reveal a tattered Confederate flag. Thanks to the wide shot, you can see the people she's passing completely, from head to foot.
  

  Figure : A wide shot captures the camcorder's biggest possible picture (top). It gives viewers a sense of place and direction. A medium shot (middle) begins to direct the audience's attention, but still captures some of the surroundings. And a closeup (bottom) is delightful for all concerned, especially if you plan to export your finished iMovie production as a QuickTime movie.

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Chapter 3: Special Event Filming

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If all you intend to do with your camcorder is to capture random events of child-hood charmingness around the house, you can skip this chapter. Just keep your camcorder lying handy, its battery charged and its tape compartment occupied, and you'll be all set.

Chances are, however, that once you've got the iMovie bug, you may become more inspired. It may occur to you to take your camcorder out of the house—to shoot the school play, your kid's sports game, your cousin's wedding, and so on. Maybe you'll decide to use the camcorder for more serious work, such as transferring your old photos to preserve them forever, creating a family history by interviewing relatives, shooting a documentary, or even making a scripted movie.

Each of these situations can benefit from a little forethought, plus a few tips, tricks, and professional techniques. This chapter is designed as a handbook to help you make the most of these common camcorder-catchable events.

What's great about an interview is that you know it's coming. You've got time to set up your tripod, arrange the lighting, and connect an external microphone, as described in . (Do all of this before your subject arrives, by the way, since nothing makes an interview subject more nervous than having to sit around beforehand, just growing apprehensive.) Because you've got this extra time to plan ahead, there's no reason your interview footage can't look almost identical in quality to the interviews you see on TV.

describes the basics of good camcorder footage. Well, in an interview situation, the same tips apply. Lighting is important: Avoid having the brightest light behind the subject's head. Sound is critical: Fasten a tie-clip microphone to your subject's lapel or collar.

Above all, use a tripod. You'll be glad you did, not only because the picture will be stable, thus permitting the audience to get more "into" the subject's world, but also for your own sake. Even the lightest camcorder is a drag to hold absolutely motionless for more than 5 minutes.

But interviews offer some additional challenges. If you've ever studied interviews on TV, such as the

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Interviews

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What's great about an interview is that you know it's coming. You've got time to set up your tripod, arrange the lighting, and connect an external microphone, as described in . (Do all of this before your subject arrives, by the way, since nothing makes an interview subject more nervous than having to sit around beforehand, just growing apprehensive.) Because you've got this extra time to plan ahead, there's no reason your interview footage can't look almost identical in quality to the interviews you see on TV.

describes the basics of good camcorder footage. Well, in an interview situation, the same tips apply. Lighting is important: Avoid having the brightest light behind the subject's head. Sound is critical: Fasten a tie-clip microphone to your subject's lapel or collar.

Above all, use a tripod. You'll be glad you did, not only because the picture will be stable, thus permitting the audience to get more "into" the subject's world, but also for your own sake. Even the lightest camcorder is a drag to hold absolutely motionless for more than 5 minutes.

But interviews offer some additional challenges. If you've ever studied interviews on TV, such as the 60 Minutes interviews that have aired every Sunday night since 1968, you realize that the producers have always thought through these questions:

• What's the purpose of the interview? The answer affects how you shoot the scene. On 60 Minutes, the purpose is often to demonstrate how guilty or shifty the subject is. Bright lights and a black background help to create this impression, as do the ultra-closeups favored by the 60 Minutes crew, in which the camera is zoomed in so tight that the pores on the subject's nose look like the craters on Mars.
  In interviews that aren't designed to be especially incriminating, however, the purpose of the interview is often to get to know the subject better. The setting you choose can go a long way toward telling more of the subject's story. Set the interview somewhere that has some meaning for, or tells something about, your subject. If it's a CEO, shoot it in her office across her handsome mahogany desk; your wide establishing shot will telegraph to your viewers just how magnificent this office is. If it's your grandfather, shoot it in his study or living room, where the accumulated mementos on the end tables suggest his lifetime of experiences. (When possible, get these cutaway and establishing shots before or after the actual interview, so as not to overwhelm your interviewee or waste his time.)

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Music Videos

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Few camcorder endeavors are as much fun as making a music video, whether it's a serious one or a fake one just for kicks.

Of course, your interest in this kind of video technique may depend on your age and taste. But music videos are worth studying, no matter who you are, because they frequently incorporate every conceivable camera trick, editing technique, and shooting style. The day you shoot a music video is the day you can try punching every button on your camcorder, unlocking those weird special effects you've never even tried, and using all the unnecessary zooms you want. Better yet, this is the day when you don't care a whit about microphones or sound. Eventually, you'll discard the camcorder's recorded sound anyway. As you splice your footage together in iMovie, you'll replace the camcorder's soundtrack with a high-quality original recording of the song.

Figure : Because you have iMovie, you can pull off a fascinating visual stunt that's very common in rock videos: the jumping-flea-musician effect, in which, every few seconds, everybody in the scene blips into a new position (or appears and disappears), sometimes in time to the music. (You're actually creating jump cuts, which you should avoid except when creating special effects like this.) Creating this effect is simple—if your camcorder has a tripod. Just shoot each segment, moving your musicians around when the camera isn't moving. In iMovie, the splices will be exactly as sharp and convincing as they are on MTV (or Bewitched).

Some music videos are lip-synched—that is, the performers pretend that they're singing the words on the soundtrack. Other videos are voiceover, narrative, or experimental videos. In these videos, you don't actually see anybody singing, but instead you watch a story unfolding (or a bunch of random-looking footage). If you decide to create a lip-synched video, take a boom box with you in the field. Make sure it's playing as you film the singers, so that they're lip-synching with accurate timing.

When it comes time to edit the music video in iMovie, you'll be able to add crossfades, transitions, graphics, and other common rock-video elements. (See .)

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Live Stage Performances

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Filming a live stage performance, such as a play, musical, concert, or dance, is extremely challenging. It poses four enormous challenges: capturing the sound, getting power, capturing the picture, and getting permission in the first place.

At most professional performances, the management doesn't permit camcorders. Whether union rules, copyright rules, house rules, or simple paranoia is at play, the bottom line is that using a camcorder (or any camera) is usually forbidden.

That leaves you two alternatives: Confine your footage to performances where camcorders are OK, such as the choir concert at the elementary school—or film surreptitiously. (As the size of camcorders shrinks year by year, the latter option is becoming ever more popular among people who don't mind flouting the rules.)

When you're filming a performance from the audience, your camcorder gets hopelessly confused. It's programmed to record the closest sounds, which, in this case, are the little coughs, chuckles, and seat-creaks of the audience members around you. The people on stage, meanwhile, come through only faintly, with the hollow echo that comes from recording people who are far away from the microphone. As any camcorder buff who's filmed her kid's school play can tell you, the resulting video is often very unsatisfying.

You have alternatives, but they require some effort. One option is to equip your camcorder with an external microphone—a unidirectional-style one. Mount it on a pole that puts the microphone over the audience's heads.

If the show has its own sound system—that is, if it's miked and amplified—you may be able to snake an external microphone up to the speaker system, so that your camcorder is benefiting from the microphones worn by every actor. Better yet, you can sometimes persuade the management to let you hook up your camcorder to the sound system itself. Connect the cable to the audio input of your camcorder, if you have one. (Unfortunately, connecting it to the microphone input may overload your sound circuitry and produce distortion.)

Before worrying about the visual quality of your live-performance footage, worry about the power. Are the batteries charged? Do you have enough battery power to film the entire show? If so, have you thought about when you can swap batteries without missing something good?

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Speeches

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What to worry about when filming talks, presentations, and speeches: the sound. Exactly as when filming live stage performances, your camcorder's built-in microphone does a lousy job of picking up a speaker more than 10 feet away. To remedy the problem, use a tie-clip microphone on extension cords, get a wireless mike, or run an external microphone to the loudspeakers (if the talk is amplified) or even directly to the sound system's mixing board.

Otherwise, the only other problem you'll encounter is the question-and-answer session, if there is one. In an auditorium situation, not only will you have a terrible time (because there isn't enough time) trying to train the camera on the person asking the question, but you won't pick up the sound at all. You can only pray that the guest speaker will be smart enough to repeat the question before providing the answer.

Capturing audience reaction shots for use as cutaways is a great idea when you're recording a talk. Splicing these shots into the finished iMovie film can make any speech footage more interesting, and gives you the freedom to edit the speech if necessary.

If your goal is to capture the entire talk, and you've got only a single camcorder, you'll have to get the reaction shots before or after the talk. Don't just pan around to the audience while the speaker is speaking.

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Sports

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