We got my 8 year old daughter the Kodak Zi8 Pocket Video Camera for Christmas. This is a great video camera for its size and price. It records video in 720P and 1080P onto an SDHC card. The video quality is quite impressive. It also takes 5 Megapixel pictures with a 4X digital zoom. Due to the size of the camera an optical zoom is not practical. It also comes with an HDMI mini to standard cable, for viewing on your HDTV. This is a nice addition. My Canon Vixia HF100 did not come with this cable I had to buy it separately.
Before buying the camera I made sure that it would work with iMovie, since we are a Mac household. I wanted to make sure my daughter would be able to use iMovie to capture her videos from the camera. According to Kodak’s specifications and their website they said that the Zi8 is compatible with the Mac and iMovie. Here’s where my frustration and enlightenment begins. If you ask my wife she would say it was a lot more frustration than enlightenment.
After my daughter had used her Zi8 to take videos on Christmas day, I decided to show her how to capture her videos with iMovie. We connected the camera to her iMac, and launched iMovie. I proceed to show her the steps for capturing video. This is where I hit a roadblock. When I pressed the capture button in iMovie I only saw the iSight camera, and not the Kodak Zi8 camera. So, I unplugged the camera from the computer, and I plugged it back in still with no success.
Now with egg on my face after telling my daughter how easy it will be to upload her videos to iMovie, I turn to Google for answers. You might be asking yourself, well did you read the manual or checkout Kodak’s support site. My answer to your query would be yes. This was part of my initial research before purchasing the camera. Consequently both Kodak’s website and the manual had the same one line sentence that read, “Upload your videos to iMovie on the Mac.” This is a loose quote of the actual quote, but I think you get the picture.
After searching the Internet for an answer, and not finding much on this issue, I found one post. The author of the post suggested that I use the import feature in iMovie. I went ahead and did this, and I was able to upload the video. However, I felt that there were too many steps involved in this process. After all I’m using iMovie, and I thought to myself that there has to be a simpler process than this for capturing video. Here comes my enlightenment.
When I connected the Zi8 to the iMac it launched iPhoto. I decided to upload both the videos and pictures my daughter took. After the upload was complete, I opened iMovie to try and attempt a simpler import. When I opened iMovie I received the following prompt:
I clicked Now, and I was presented with the following window:
Once it completed generating the iPhoto Video thumbnails I was able to view the captured videos. This is a an unorthodox way of capturing video, but it was less steps and simpler this way. I guess iMovie sees the Kodak Zi8 as a still camera and not a video camera; when in fact it is a video camera. I just wish Kodak had a little more information on their site regarding capturing video on a Mac. But, I figured it out, and I hope this will help others that have encountered similar issues.
With that now behind me. I once again showed my daughter how to capture her videos to iMovie. The next step now is to show her how she can harness iMovie’s features to make some great looking videos. This is where the real fun begins.
