Mimsy Were the Borogoves

Mimsy Were the Technocrats: As long as we keep talking about it, it’s technology.

Video podcasting with the iMac’s built-in iSight

Jerry Stratton, November 17, 2005

The new G5 iMac with built-in video would seem at first glance to be the perfect tool for podcasting and video podcasting. With GarageBand and iMovie bundled with all Macs, everything you need for creating a video podcast comes with the computer--except that it doesn’t. The new built-in iSight is a USB camera, not a FireWire camera, and iMovie only works with FireWire cameras. I expect that Apple will remedy that pretty quickly, but for now iMovie doesn’t work with the built-in iSight.

Quicktime Pro does work with the built-in iSight, because Quicktime Pro supports USB cameras. Quicktime Pro is inexpensive, but inexpensive still isn’t free, and it makes no sense to shell out cash to fix a problem that shouldn’t be a problem to begin with.

Enter Quicktime Broadcaster. Quicktime Broadcaster is a free download from Apple, designed for live broadcasts. But it can also save those live broadcasts to a Quicktime file. Note, though, that while Broadcaster looks to be a pretty easy way to do live broadcasts, it’s a bit tricky to get a good static file out of it. But it does work and it is free. It is a useful means of creating video while waiting for the next version of iMovie.

MacDevCentral has a good tutorial on how to set up Quicktime Broadcaster, titled Making Movies with the Apple iSight. MacDevCentral is talking about the old, external, FireWire iSight, but their instructions for using Quicktime Broadcaster do work with the new, internal, USB iSight. Scroll down to the section titled “Capturing Video with QuickTime Broadcaster”.

January 10, 2006: iMovie 2006 supports built-in iSight

As expected, the version of iMovie announced this morning as part of iLife 06 supports the built-in USB iSight on the iMacs. Most likely this is the same iSight present on the new Intel iMacs and Macbooks. This will make video podcasting using the iSight a whole lot easier.

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