Video Footage into iPad 2 for iMovie

One of the points Steve Jobs made sure he emphasized during the iPad 2 unveil was that it was now powerful enough to be a portable video editing tool.  He rolled out the new iMovie made specifically for the iPad and demonstrated how you would edit footage you shot with the iPad 2’s built in camera.

However, that’s where the problems begin.  Unfortunately, the camera on the iPad 2 really isn’t very good, not to mention that fact that you would probably look rather ridiculous walking around on vacation with a 10 inch tablet in front of your face.  So how do we get footage we shot elsewhere (either on our cell phones or dedicated still or video cameras) into the iPad to edit on iMovie.

If you just transfer footage in, you will be able to see the footage in your photos folder, but you won’t be able to access it in iMovie.  The reason for this is that iMovie is very particular about the type of encoding the videos have to be in to be recognized.  Photos, for the most part, will be ok to be transferred in, but video must be transformed into a format that iMovie and the iPad 2 like.

After much research, a user on the Apple forums seems to have discovered the secret.  Forum member Zwiller5 has found a program that will do the conversion as well as the correct settings to make your video footage and your iPad 2 live in harmony.  You can see his original settings at this following link…

Apple Forums: Settings for Video for iMovie on iPad 2

(You’ll have to scroll down a little to find his post.)

The program he suggests using is a PC application called Aleesoft Free iPad Video Converter (the name sounds pretty self explanatory).  He also includes all of the settings.  The application itself is relatively user friendly so you should be able to enter the information without too much hassle.  I tried it myself and have converted footage shot on my Nexus S as well as footage shot on my Panasonic point and shoot that does 720p video.  Both times the footage came out very well and the editing in iMovie was a breeze.

I’m going to keep looking for a more suitable program for the Mac that can do the same thing, but in the meantime we can now start transferring footage over to the iPad and let out the Scorsese in all of us.

Getting Video Into Your Android

So by now you’re a DVD ripping wizard. You’ve got some movies on your computer in the MP4 format and you’re ready to get those into your Android device. The last (and arguably easiest) step is transferring the video files. There are several ways to do this so we’ll start with the basics.

Click the button at the bottom to mount your Memory Card

First off, we’re going to do this by simply manually dragging the video file into our phones memory card or built in memory (depending on your phone). First off, we’ll plug our phone into the computer using a USB cable (usually a microUSB cable for Android phones). Depending on how your phone is setup, it may automatically show up as a new external drive on your computer. We’ll assume it didn’t. Pull the down your drop down status bar and you should see an option saying “Select to Copy Files to This Device” (or something like that). On the next screen press the “Connect USB Storage” button and give the device a moment to mount the memory card.

Now, on your computer your memory card will show up as an external storage drive. On the PC use Windows Explorer to find your memory card, and on the Mac use Finder. On the memory card I like to have a folder called “Videos” that I use to hold all my movies. Create this folder on your memory card and then just click and drag the video file from wherever it is on your computer into this folder. Depending on the size of the file, it could take a few minutes to complete the transfer.

The Memory card appearing on the desktop on a Mac

Now you can open your gallery and go to the video folder and your movie should be there, ready to be played. You can also download other apps on the market to use as your video players. I like the DoubleTwist player. You can download it from the market for free and it’s great because it does a great job of remembering where you stopped watching the movie and continues from there next time you start watching.

If you had any kind of errors in this process, drop a note in the comments and let me know what device you were trying this with. In the next article we’re going to look at doing the same thing using Double Twist. Stay tuned…