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| Using iSight with iMovie By Russ White I picked up an iSight last week, and it's a fun little gadget. I do have ulterior motives, I'm trying to get my parents to upgrade from my old hand-me-down heavily upgraded 7500 to an iSight compatible Mac (any G3 Mac with a 600MHz processor or more), that way we can have video chat and not have to deal with phone bills. Getting them to upgrade is like getting blood from a stone. Mom's excuse is that she "doesn't use the 7500 to anywhere near it's capacity," yet all the stuff she wants to use (iPhoto, iChat AV, iMovie) requires a native G3 and Mac OS X. The problem is Mom knows that since her son is a tech, she always ends up with my old hand-me-downs. She knows if she waits long enough she'll inherit a FireWire based Mac without having to spend any money, she's crafty that way. ;) Anyway, the minimum system specs for the iSight are a 600MHz G3, but I was wondering what would happen if I put it on my 500MHz iBook (Dual USB). I plugged it in, the green "On Air" light illuminated for a few seconds and went out. iChat AV refused to see it, but I *know* the computer did see it as the on-air light did activate momentarily. Back on the TiBook and the Sawtooth, I tried to hook up the iSight and use it in iMovie, but since the iSight doesn't export footage in the DV format, it can't be used in iMovie. However, in searching the web I did find a rather interesting article on the O’Reilly Macdevcenter webpage: http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2003/07/01/isight.html It was a walkthrough on how to make movies using the iSight. To sum up, you need the iSight, QuickTime Pro, and QuickTime Broadcaster. If you want better sound quality, an external mic pod like the Griffin iMic adapter should help. Digitize video with Broadcaster to your hard drive (the procedure is detailed in the article), and then assemble it in QT Pro. In theory, with QuickTime Pro, you should be able to export the footage you recorded to the DV format, the one iMovie recognizes. So with this convoluted workaround you may be able to use the iSight in iMovie, just not directly. Bear in mind that since the iSight captures video at 640x480 resolution at 30 FPS, it's not going to look as sharp or clear as a true DV camera. But, if you just want to play, or make training videos, it'll be fine. After all, a $149 web cam is not made to compete with a $600+ DV camera. Looks like I have some playing to do! ;) |