Watch TV with iMovie full screen!!!

Z

zootbobbalu

Registered
Don't know if this has been posted here before (and yes I did do a search to see if it has), but to those who haven't tried this yet read on.......

I have a FireWire video bridge (video capture device) so I can bring in analog video sources into iMovie. But, when I'm not playing director I use the video bridge to watch regular TV on my desktop with the help of an old VCR (used as a cable/TV tuner). I could never figure out a way in iMovie to watch the video source full screen in preview mode. I was playing around with the zoom feature that is a new feature in Jaguar's Universal Access System Preferences Panel, then it hit me. I could zoom the upper left hand side of the screen when I'm watching TV in iMovie and start watching TV in full screen mode!!

To zoom the upper left corner:

1. Open System Preferences
2. click on Universal Access
3. click on Turn On Zoom
4. launch iMovie
5. switch to import mode (move the little blue switch at the bottom left of the preview window toward the icon of the movie camera)
6. press play
7. mouse over to the upper left most portion of the screen and press:

opt - apple - "+" to zoom in
opt - apple - "-" to zoom out

Like I was saying if this is old news oh well, but if this is news to some people than I guess this post was worth it!!
 
Sorry,

A hardware bridge is any device that can convert one format to another, for instance there is an IDE/FireWire bridge to allow people to use their old ATA drives and connect them to their computer through a FireWire port. The video bridge I was talking about is a device that converts analog video to digital video and then makes the digital content available over FireWire. I should of just called it my video capture device.
 
Hmm... I guess a tv tuner would be cheaper if you don't have such a bridge yet. :)
 
how much does a bridge costs like that one? Cause i have an analogue video camera here at home, but i can't use it anymore on my computer -a Graphite iMac- to put my movie together! So that bridge would be the solution!
 
I just downloaded this and it didn't work with my video adapter. Their website states that you have to use Jaguar, so maybe Video Viewer requires Quarts Extreme to work (I only have 16MB of VRAM so I might be SOL). I'm running a G4 Cube 450MHz/768MB/120G with an ATI Rage 128 (16MB). Maybe if I upgrade my video card things might work. The zoom feature in Universal Access works with only 16MB of VRAM but it produces little artifacts when I max out my resolution to 1920x1440 and zoom into the preview window in iMovie. If my resolution is set from 1600x1200 or lower things work great.

I did notice that when Video Viewer is running, iMovie wont let you use your dv source (Video Viewer is probably taking control if it). Just quit Video Viewer to bring things back to normal.
 
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