iMovie Tutorial, Lesson #1

1 Lesson 1: Getting Your Video Into iMovie 1The images you shoot with your camcorder are on digital videotape. In order to edit them with iMovie, you need to get that video footage into your computer. The process of transferring video from the videotape in your camcorder to the hard disk in your computer is called importing. It’s quick and easy to import your video using the controls in the iMovie window.When you import your movie footage into iMovie, the raw video on your videotape is not changed or deleted. Instead, a copy of it is created on your hard disk. You will work with the copy in iMovie.What You'll NeedBefore you start, make sure that you have each of the following items on hand:• Your camcorder and videotape• FireWire cable• Macintosh computer with a FireWire port• At least 2 gigabytes (GB) of free hard disk space• At least 256 megabytes (MB) of random access memory (RAM)Before You BeginTo make it easier to do the tasks in this lesson, print the lesson before you start.In many tasks shown in this lesson and in iMovie Help, you need to choose menu commands, which look like this:Choose Edit > Clear.The first term after Choose is the name of a menu in the iMovie menu bar (shown below). The next term (or terms) are the items you choose from that menu.1Tutorial FireWireThe FireWire port on your Mac has this icon next to it: FireWire, which is also called IEEE 1394, is a technology that lets you transfer ...