iMovie: An Unsung Hero
When it comes to capturing, editing and ultimately outputting digital video quickly and easily, very few programs beat iMovie. Apple bills iMovie as a consumer product, but I use for the majority of the video that my institution produces.
I should step back a second and note that when I say iMovie, I don’t mean the most recent overhaul of iMovie that was released as part of iLife ‘08. If you have a new Mac, you can download the last version of iMovie here.
Capturing is one of iMovie’s great strengths. Dumping from tape is easy but I actually capture a different way. For some shoots, I capture video live on location directly from the camera into iMovie. For starters, this is a good method for longer productions since you don’t have to switch tapes during a show and miss something. Second, it saves time later on when it’s time to capture video, again, especially for large pieces.
iMovie captures and edits HD with no problems at all. We’ve shot a few projects in HD and it’s been a champ. It takes more disk room and more time to render in HD, but the wait is well worth it.
Once you’ve edited your video, you can output to a variety of formats and media, including iDVD. Most times, we output MP4 H.264 files that we either transfer to high quality FLV and post online* (example here), or use this high quality file as the basis for what we upload to YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, etc.
Here, for example, is a video we shot on location in downtown Meadville. The event was a fundraiser for downtown development, and our new president participated as a server at this 50’s-style event.
Allegheny Community Participates in Up With Downtown from Allegheny College on Vimeo.
If you want to see it in full HD, click here.
In the end, I move iMovie. It’s easy, yet allows me to quickly produce tightly edited pieces with graphics, music, cuts and more.
* - Videos are stored at Amazon S3. Of course, right?
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[...] on our rustic bridge. The videos were edited in iMovie. I blogged last month about how great iMovie is. For now, we’re just putting these in YouTube though we will eventually upload them to Vimeo [...]