Capturing live from a video mixer

I would imagine that depends on whether iMovie (or FCE for that matter) recognizes the switcher as either a controllable or non-conrollable device. In other words, does the switcher have a Firewire out and does iMovie see it? the number of streams won't matter to iMovie, it is the switcher that takes all the independent feeds, mixing them down to one. Now the inherent drawback to using any computer to capture your feed is that one glitch, one system freeze and "poof", all is gone. Typically, you want to capture from the mixer back to tape. Safe & reliable. Now if the deck has a Firewire out that iMovie recognizes, your can capture to iMovie and if anything goes wrong, you still have your tape.

Mike

You may need to feed the output of the mixer through either a Capture Device which has composite video IN and FireWire OUT, or through a camcorder which has "digital pass-through" (..again; analog input and simultaneous digital output..) because iMovie captures, as Mike says (above) only via FireWire.

Unless your mixer does have a FireWire output - which is rather unlikely - its output must be fed through some other device which does have a FireWire output ..like this, or this, or this..

First of all, if you're shooting either normal (4x3) DV or 'widescreen' DV, you'll have to select the appropriate format when you start a New Project. (..See items 6 and 7, and the accompanying pics, in my post here..)

So when you slide the little onscreen selector from the "scissors" icon to the "camcorder" icon, and then click on the camcorder icon itself to choose the name of your mixer it may show "DV-VCR" or some other device name, as it's unlikely to know the exact name of your mixer. If no name is showing, and the iMovie screen says "No Camera Connected", just quit from iMovie and then restart iMovie.

You should then see the live feed, and then just click on 'Import'.

Alternatively, instead of importing with iMovie, you might try downloading and using BTV. You can then edit that captured material with iMovie.

[..P.S: I don't think BTV, or BTV Pro, is a "universal" application, so it should work OK with your PowerPC Mac(s), but maybe not with an Intel-based Mac..]