Send screen video & audio directly to HandyCam?

Question

Trying to record a slideshow to my Handycam & the best I've been able to come up with is to burn it to a dvd & then play it back into the Handycam. Is there a way to do it directly?

Answer 1

Several. Some of your options depend on which HandyCam you are using.
In the most general case, you can purchase the appropriate converters to connect to the external monitor connection and headphone out to connect to the analog input on your camcorder. What you chose would depend on the model and it's inputs of course (you'd want to use the best option). Which still analog, the video will come out superior to the Mac -> DVD -> DV option as it removes a data compression and an analog conversion step from the process.
The models that use mini-DV tapes will permit you to "print-to-video". This can be done with Final Cut Express, MacCaption, Adobe Premiere, and maybe others. In that scenario, you'd capture the audio and video on the computer to a file (say and MP4), and then use one of the tools to send a scaled down version to the DV tape over FireWire. You'll lose resolution in the scaling of the video, of course, but you can't help that (DV is only 720x480 pixels).
If you HandyCam is a memory-card model, you simply need to save the video in the appropriate format and resolution to the card. Generally, this would be either MPEG2 or MPEG4.