Creative Notes

Stellar programs for printing labels

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Camcorder shooting tips for the holidays

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Design tips for holiday greeting cards

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Camcorder tips for the holidays

The holidays are a time for not only getting together with friends, expressing affection through cards and gifts, and ingesting far too many sweets, but also the time of year when the family camcorder gets the greatest work-out. To help ensure that the videos taken with your camcorder are as enjoyable as the events it captures, follow these tips.

Scout the location

If you have the opportunity, spend some time in the location where you’ll shoot before the big event takes place. While there, keep an eye out for good and bad light sources and take some test shots. Doing so allows you to dial in an appropriate white balance setting and take note of locations where you do and, particularly, don’t want to shoot—facing a bright window that will wash out the subject standing in front of it, for instance.

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Stellar programs for printing labels

'Tis the season to be printing address labels, not to mention package labels and envelopes. There are several powerful and creative products available that will give you beautiful and festive results, ranging from free to $50.

At the free end of the spectrum is Avery Design & Print Online, a Web-based utility for printing and merging contacts onto Avery's huge variety of labels. It also offers a sizable collection of clip art or lets you upload your own images to decorate holiday labels. If your needs are fairly modest, Avery Design & Print Online may fill the bill for you.

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Design tips for holiday greeting cards

Designing your own holiday cards makes for fun, creative, and deeply personal messages to friends and family. Armed with your trusty Mac and a digital camera, the design possibilities are endless! Here are three ideas to get your creative juices flowing fast.

Document setup

No matter which software you use—I demo the techniques with Photoshop CS5 and Photoshop Elements 10, but you can use almost any image editor—start with a 5-by-7-inch document. With Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, set the resolution to 250 ppi (pixels per inch). Be sure to keep text and other important parts of the message at least a quarter inch away from the document’s edge to ensure they’re not cropped when printed.

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Import camera videos directly into iMovie '11

To us, a video shot with a camcorder and a video shot with a DSLR or compact camera are essentially the same thing: a video file stored on a memory card. But to iLife, they're different: iMovie was designed to import footage from devices that primarily shoot video, while iPhoto was designed to import images from still cameras.

By necessity, iPhoto can import video files shot by still cameras. Since iMovie can't import those files directly, it offers a bridge: In the Event Library, click the iPhoto Videos item to view movies stored in your iPhoto library. (You may be asked to let iMovie generate thumbnails of those movies to see them properly.)

However, this approach doesn't give you the advantage of organizing movies into iMovie Events. When you need more clips for a project, you have to keep returning to the large list of iPhoto Videos. One solution is to copy iPhoto videos to your existing iMovie Events—but then you end up with duplicate clips on your hard disk, taking up a lot of valuable space.

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