Importing the Camcorder Footage
With your project ready, it is time to pull your raw camcorder footage in. You import your raw camcorder video into iMovie through the iMovie monitor window in the upper left-hand corner of your screen. As you look at the lower left-hand corner of the iMovie monitor window, you will see a symbol for a film and a symbol for a DV camera. If you get lost, use the screen shot below as a reference. iMovie starts in the Edit Mode. Clicking the little camera symbol will, you guessed it, slide the toggle over to Camera Mode. If your camcorder is not connected properly or is not turned on, the iMovie monitor window will turn blue and say "Camera Disconnected."

Clicking the DV camera switches iMovie to Camera Mode. Use the VCR-like controls and the Import button to grab your footage into the Shelf window on the right side of the screen.

Turn on your camcorder and slide it into its VCR mode. On many camcorders, this mode is in the opposite direction of the setting where you turn the camcorder on to shoot video. On the Optura pi, for example, turning the power control to the right turns on the "Movie" function while turning the control to the left turns on the "VCR" function.

If you have connected the FireWire cable properly, once you turn on the VCR function the camcorder will power up and begin to talk to the computer. Within a few seconds, the iMovie monitor window will change from "Camera Disconnected" to "Camera Connected."

Finding and Importing Scenes
At the bottom of the iMovie monitor window is a series of VCR-like control buttons and a big button that says Import. The process is simple. With a compatible FireWire camera, hit the Play button to tell iMovie to make your camcorder play. As you need to, you can pause, fast-forward, rewind, skim, or stop the footage playback just like you would with any VCR. When you see footage that you wish to copy to your project, simply press the Import button and iMovie will start recording from your camcorder. When a scene ends, you can press stop or press import again to start a new scene. As you import scenes into your iMovie project, you will notice that the shelf area in the upper right side of the screen begins to fill with thumbnail images of your video clips.

With some footage on some camcorders, iMovie will actually detect the scene changes and automatically break the clips up automatically. You can enable or disable this feature in the iMovie preferences. Since hard drive space is tight for most people, I would encourage you to do a little editing as you import your footage. Don't grab everything. Only grab the best footage you can use. Your hard drive will thank you. (Ed. Note: try to leave at least 10% blank space on your hard drive).