Using your cell phone to record video

Most of you have a perfectly good video camera in your pocket or bag.  It's in your cell phone!

All you need is a few tips to help you record clean, clear video and copy the clips from your phone to a computer so that you can edit it further.

Watch our video for some tips to make that easier and more satisfying.

This video was shot using the cell phones shown in the video and edited in iMovie and Adobe Premiere. Audio was edited with GarageBand.  The MEWS video consultants can help you with all of these techniques. Come talk to us before you begin filming and we can help you plan a successful and easy video production project.

Importing videos into iMovie

Before you can start editing video clips on iMovie, they have to be imported. Importing means bringing videos into iMovie. This article gives you brief instructions on how to import video clips into iMovie.

Connect the camera to the Mac, with the memory card inside the camera. You will need the cable provided with your camera to do this. Set the camera to playback or VTR mode; this is the same mode you use to view photos/videos on the camera. Some cameras may need you to make additional selection to indicate whether you are connecting to a computer or to some other recording device. Read your camera instructions for more information.

Open iMovie and click on the File option. Choose Import and then Movies.

 

This dialog box appears.

It allows you to choose where you want to save the footage. It is convenient because it shows how much footage can be stored on each one of your hard drives. You can add these clips to any existing event, or you can create a new event. You also have the option to split days into events, so if you have recorded footage over separate days, it will have its own event based on the date. You get to choose how you want to keep the imported video, either Large or Full (original) size.  The last option here is the choice of whether you want to Copy Files or Move Files. By choosing Copy Files, you retain the original files intact after copying them into iMovie, and by choosing Move Files, you delete the original files after copying them into iMovie. Once you have decided on the settings, click Import.

Import window opens up.

All the clips recorded on the camera appear right here. You can selectively check the ones you want to import or uncheck the ones you don’t want to import.  A quick way to uncheck all the clips is to hold down Option while clicking the check box of the clips you want to keep. This unchecks everything else.

iMovie offers you the option to analyze video while you import it. You can analyze the video for Stabilization and People, using the Analyze Video option in the Import window. Stabilization feature allows iMovie to take shaky footages and smoothen it out; People feature is for iMovie to go through the footage and detect the presence of people. This can be useful if you want to find just the footages that have people in it, later. If you select any of these options, just be aware that it will add significant amount of time to your import.  Once you have made your selection, you can click Import Checked.

Here are few other resources you might find useful to learn more about this.

http://support.apple.com/kb/ph2153

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoOMkrf7-w4

Saving iMovie Project to an External Hard Drive

Before saving your iMovie project, please make sure that your external hard drive is compatible. Your external hard drive must be formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled). iMovie doesn’t support network-attached storage (mapped network drive or Google Drive) or external flash memory drives.

Saving a project to a hard disk:

1. First connect the external hard disk to your computer, and the grayish icon will appear in your event library.

2. Go to Project Library


Note: Project library button is located at the top left corner 

Select the project you have created. If you need to move the project, hold down the Command key as you drag the project to the icon of your external hard drive, and then choose “Move project” or “Move project and Events. If you need to copy the project, simply drag your project to the icon of the hard disk (in the Event Library) to your external hard drive.

“Copy Project/ or Move project” means that project in its new location rather than physically copying project’s video and other media (such as photos) onto the other disk. This will NOT allow you to work on your project from another Mac. It creates only a copy of the project file, no clips, images, etc. that are part of your project. This is not usually useful for protecting/backing up your work. 

“Copy Projects and Events/ or Move Projects and Events” means that the source video and other media you added to the project are copied to the new location/ hard drive. If you select Move, instead of Copy, these files will be deleted from their original location. Moving or Copying Project and Events will allow you to work on your project from another Mac. 

Note: Move vs. Copy?

Copying the file will not delete your projects from original location while moving will delete your projects from original location.

Make sure you select Move Projects and Events!

Please remember that computers at MEWS are frozen, which means that they automatically delete any saved files on the computer!


Click here for more in depth explanation :)

What is aspect ratio and how to set the aspect ratio in your iMovie.

Aspect ratio of an image is the image’s width to height ratio. In order to avoid black bars in the sides of your iMovie video, you must use the correct aspect ratio for your project. Most videos today have either 4 : 3 or the  6 : 9 (also called widscreen) aspect ratio.  It’s good if you know what aspect ratio the video you are importing to iMovie has.

You can learn more about aspect ratios here.

 

How to have the right aspect ratio for your iMovie project? 

The only time when you will get to determine your iMovie video’s aspect ratio is when you first create your project.

To create a new project, go to File -> New Project.

A new window will pop up asking you to name the project. Be sure to give your project a unique, appropriate name.

Under the Aspect Ratio section, you can choose between 4 : 3 and Widescreen aspect ratios.

That's it! Now you can enjoy creating videos without any disproportionate dimensions. =)

How To Split a Clip and Detach its audio

- Make sure the part of the video you want the audio to be detached from is a single clip.  Partial audio cannot be detached from a clip.

-  To split smaller clips out of a bigger clip, you can select the portion of the clip you want to split, right-click on it and select ‘Split Clip’.

- You should now see the clear gap between the two clips.

- To detach the audio from a clip, just right  click on the clip and choose ‘Detach Audio’.

- You should now see a purple banner under your clip. That’s the detached audio.

- You can now move the audio within your project without changing the video sequence.

Or you can delete the audio altogether without deleting the video. The clips will have no sound over it. Just right click on the audio clip and select ‘delete selection’.

Enjoy your movie!