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Pointers: Get video onto iMovie for iPad
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Apr 18, 2016, 04:23 PM
 
If you'd asked us two weeks ago how to get a lot of video onto your iPad for editing, we'd have said iCloud Drive or Dropbox, and admitted that we'd never had to do it ourselves. Now we've had to do it ourselves, and discovered that the answer is ... iCloud Drive or Dropbox. It took us a few steps to get there, though, and since we could not find any advice about this online, let us make this Pointers be clear about it for you, and for us when we come to do all this again.

This Pointers will show you how to take a lot of video footage off your Mac and onto iMovie on your iPad Pro, ready for editing. We do mean a lot: we had around 45GB of HD footage split up into something like 50 files.

We also said yes to the job because we knew we could pick up Apple's new Lightning to USB 3 Camera Connector, which as everyone has gathered and Apple keeps saying, isn't just for cameras. Yeah, it might as well be. At least for this job, we found it worthless. We could do you a podcast recording about how worthless it was, and we could send that to you over Ethernet using this cable, but we couldn't get the footage on.

One important thing: if your video is on your camera, get the cable, because the odds are that it will work and it will certainly be easier than the way we're about to show you. Curiously, though, video cameras have always had oddities to do with what computers can read their files; if you have an option to test this stuff out before shooting hours of footage, take it.

We didn't have the option

The footage came to us on a tiny USB stick, and it was simple to copy it all onto our Macs and see what we've got. Then we knew that we would be editing it on our iPads: we're not strange, and we're not doing that for fun, we're doing it because our only available editing time is during a long flight or two.



Still, we have the footage, and we know where's it going: even when the cable let us down, we knew there was the iTunes route. Do try this, but try it with a sample of your footage, not the whole thing. For while it ought to work, while it appeared to work, and actually we've done it before where it really did work, it failed for us this time.

Nonetheless, this is how you use iTunes to get video or any other file onto your iPad: open iTunes and connect the iPad via a Lightning cable, as Wi-Fi transfer will destroy your soul before you even get a fifth of the way through the job. When iTunes sees the iPad, it will show you the contents of it: you may have to click on the iPad icon in the row that begins Music, Films, TV and so on.

In that display of the contents, there will be a panel on the left that shows a list of categories including Apps. Click on Apps. You get the ability to edit what apps you have on your iPad and on what screens they appear, but ignore all of that and keep scrolling down.

Beneath the lists of every app you have on the iPad, there is a list of all the ones that you can copy documents to. Click on iMovie, and the panel to its right is probably empty. The idea is that you can drag a file into that blank space, and your Mac will copy it over the iPad and into the app.

The idea is that you'll then open your app on the iPad, and it will have the files in there waiting for you. We copied over the 45GB or so, leaving it copying overnight for sanity reasons; then, in the morning, opened iMovie to find nothing from that list at all. While iTunes says yep, it's there, no it wasn't: iMovie could not show us any of the new footage. That's not that it wouldn't play them back, it wouldn't show them to us in the library at all. We went back to the iTunes list, selected all the movie files, and deleted them. Then re-synced and re-backed up our iPad, rather than risk leaving 45Gb there doing nothing but take up space.

The long way around

If iTunes doesn't do it the way it should, then clearly iCloud Drive or Dropbox will. We've gone for iCloud, and we've done it for the very most technical of reasons: it happens to be the service that we have enough space on. Other than that, we know no advantage of one over the other.

If you're stuck for space on either, remember that you can move files out of Dropbox or iCloud Drive onto your desktop, and then put all or some of the video ones in there. If you do this the way we're about to show you, Dropbox and iCloud Drive are transport mechanisms: they get the footage to where it's going, they aren't storage ones where you'll keep this stuff forever.



Even though they are only going to be there temporarily, though, make a folder for them: there are a lot of files, and it's going to be tedious enough without you having to search for any among your Pages documents or whatever you keep in Dropbox. Make a folder, drag the videos in there.

Both services are going to take you some time, as they upload and download, and both are going to take some concentration as the 45GB or whatever go over in their 50 separate files, and later on will need to be opened separately.

Deep breath. Open iMovie on your iPad and start to create a new movie. When you do that, you have to choose a type and a theme: just click on any for now, or do what we did and pick Simple. We're not here to mess around with iMovie transitions and effects, we just want to see the raw footage and edit it down.

Next, you get a window that has a view of your footage in the top left -- blank now because you haven't any footage -- and a timeline of clips at the bottom which is also blank for the same reason. You should then also have a slide-out menu on the far right: you may need to tap on the top right icon, which is a film strip with a musical note. With that tapped, you get a list of places to import video from. At the bottom of the list there is iCloud Drive.

Choose that, and you get a fairly standard Open dialog box that shows you all the files and folders in the top level of iCloud Drive. If you went the Dropbox route, click on the button marked Locations at top left: that will let you select Dropbox, and drill down to your new video folder.

One enormous irritation is that neither iCloud Drive nor Dropbox will remember where you were last looking. So we opened iCloud Drive, opened the video folder, tapped on the first video, brought it in -- and then had to do all of that 49 more times.



Each one you bring in is quite a substantial file, so do this on Wi-Fi, and have coffee with you. There's no way we can see in iMovie to tap on a clip and tell what it's called, so it's down to you to remember what the last one you imported was. If you accidentally import the same one twice, iMovie doesn't re-download it, it just duplicates it in the timeline. At first we were irritated by this, but after 20 imports, we'd put up with duplicates no problem. Our difficulty was in making sure we didn't miss any.

The bad thing is that we cannot be sure whether we've missed anything or not. We didn't shoot this footage, so it isn't even as if we can spot when something is missing. Mind you, spotting that while doing an in-flight edit with the missing footage back on our Macs a thousand miles away wouldn't be our finest moment.

However, the good thing is that iMovie turns out to be rather good editor. It's basic of course, and especially so on the iPad, but using an iPad Pro and an Apple Pencil to make at least a first rough-cut assembly of a video is absorbing and even, we're going to say it, fun.

-- William Gallagher (@WGallagher)
     
OhBrother
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Join Date: Apr 2016
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Apr 22, 2016, 09:45 AM
 
My previous two comments were removed apparently for "trolling", so I may not have chosen the best wording. let me offer the information I posted previously as respectfully as I can:

there are tablets out there that allow you to move video/large files directly to your device via USB flash drives, hard drives, and any media you choose. Consider doing some research into these. I move multiple GB on and off my tablet every day and edit video without a single problem.. no internet connection even required.

I do hope this information I've offered will benefit readers. Thanks.
     
Spheric Harlot
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Apr 22, 2016, 11:31 AM
 
How is that relevant to an instructional thread about getting movies into iMovie?

Incidentally, if you'd read the article, you'd note that the first suggestion does not require wi-if or an Internet connection, as it's wired transfer via Lightning cable.

Congratulations.
     
   
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