Trouble connecting camcorder

Question

I have a film project for school and I offered to edit our footage. The camera is a Canon ZR 500, and I have the correct FireWire cable, and the cable for the camera itself is an IEEE 1384. When I hook it to my MacBook Pro, nothing happens, and when I open iMovie, I'm not sure how to retrieve the footage. This is my first time trying to use iMovie (at all) so I would appreciate some advice. Thanks!

Answer 1

Hello, Kenneth,
For first timers, Apple has a good tutorial that might be helpful to get you started. Look a href="http://www.apple.com/ilife/tutorials/imovie/index.html">here If you are planning to use iDVD, have a look at its tutorial, also.
But, first, you need to connect the camcorder properly. Some companies (Sony for one) call their Firewire links IEEE so you are ok with the cable you have. Put it from the camcorder directly into your computer. You are right, when you first connect it nothing will happen....you need to open a new iMovie project, turn on the connected camera, being sure it is in VTR mode. You should then see a blue screen in iMovie and have a button that says 'import.' Click on that, and the movie should start importing from your camcorder. You can stop and start the importing as you wish. When the movie is loaded into iMovie, you can start editing your clips.
You should option-click on a clip and drag it down to the timeline. That will move a copy to the time line, leaving the original on the clips pane. Drag all the clips you want in the movie into the timeline. Then select each clip in turn and begin your editing. Be sure to save often.
The timeline can be viewed in two ways: Clips view and timeline view. The clips view is easier to see for editing the clips. The timeline view shows three tracks: one is your video and two are audio tracks into which you can add music/audio clips.
You can add titles, transitions, effects, to your clips.
When you are finished editing and your movie is complete, you will need to save it and then export it for whatever form is your desired final result.
If you want to make it into a DVD, close iMovie, open iDVD, create your project and drag your movie into iDVD from the 'media' ->'movies' panes in iDVD. When you are satisfied with your iDVD project, save it 'as disk image' and you can burn your DVDs from the disk image using Disk Utility.
You could also export your movie back to DV tape in your camcorder using iMovie's 'Share' command.
You can export it as QuickTime movie for web use, emailing, etc.
What you do depends on what outcome you want.
This is just a very quick sketch of how it works. Check out the tutorials and then get started. Post back if you run into trouble. Have fun!