iSight for Photos and Video

I'm assuming the reason that Apple put a lesser camera in the Air is that the cameras used in the MacBook and MacBook Pro were just too to big to fit. (The MB has camera the same resolution as the Air, the MBPro has a higher-rez camera.) On the Air, images in all but dim light can look slightly overexposed and washed out. In dim light, they're also grainy. Despite the limitations, the Air's iSight is still a valuable tool. You're never without it, it integrates with Photo Booth/iMovie/Quicktime Pro/other apps, and under controlled conditions, it does an reasonably good job. However I am not entirely convinced that it's a 320x240 resolution camera with the rixels rezed up to 640x480. This would explain why the 320x240 resolution video looks surprisingly better.

Stills
The best way to use the camera for stills is Photo Booth. It's a free app that comes with your Air and works fine for still images. You'll find it in your applications folder. Import Photo Booth image into iPhoto to do a little tweaking for best results:

• While viewing the image, click on the iPhoto icon.
• Once the image is imported into iPhoto, double click on it.
• Click on the Adjust icon.
• When the Adjust dash opens, drag the Saturation slider right to 70.
• Drag the Reduce Noise slider right to +25.
• Click on the Done button.

Video
Things get stickier here because you have options. What you choose depends on the resolution and frame rate you want and the price you're willing to pay.

Photo Booth does video. Open it and click on the film icon on left below the screen. Click on the camera button. As with stills, you get the countdown and you're rolling. It's simple. Resolution is the full 640x480 but the frame rate is a slow eight frames a second. If you add effects the frame rate is even slower. Files are small, so this might be useful for quick video letters you can email to friends, provided they don't require an accurate sense of movement. (Also, Photo Booth movies come out flipped with letters backwards. This can easily be corrected in QuickTime Pro.)

iMovie is another app that comes with your Air. Click on the camera icon on the left side of the screen and you're ready to capture video into iMovie. This will record at 640x480 at 30fps, which is the best you can get. However it's a bit more cumbersome to use since you have to open iMovie and create a project as well. Then you have to export it to play it.

Make sure you have the aspect ratio in your Project Properties set to Standard or the top and the bottom of the screen will be cropped to make a wide image. iMovie creates a decent quality movie, but is a bit more cumbersome to use than Photo Booth.

QuickTime Pro is my choice for isights video. But it does cost $30. If you do a lot of work with video files, you'll find many other uses. QT Pro offers some video settings to choose from. Native quality records at 640x480 at 30fps which look a touch better than iMovie's video. Best Quality records at 640x480 at 15fps and Better Quality records at 320x240 at 15 fps. Good Quality records MP4s at 640x480 17fps and a high compression rate for mailing.

Here is a sample of Jodi Mathews singing Bridal Train. This was recorded with QT Pro at Native quality. The lighting was diffuse window light from 6 feet away. The soft focus effect was strictly the result of the camera and lighting with no effects added. Jodi liked the look of this much better than the Casio 880 which also recorded the song. Casio video is greatly superior, but created much larger files, despite being recorded at the same resolution. Some have expressed concerns about editing video on the Air. One of the Casio recordings was almost a gig in size. The Air and QT Pro handled the editing of this file easily.

What's most impressive about the recording is the audio. It will sound decent through you speakers, but listen to it over headphones to really hear just how solid it is. This was recorded on battery power from about 3 ft away in an acoustically poor room using the built-in mic. I'm sure the fan in the Air ran at a low level at some point, but it's not audible. And the lack of a whirring drive means that the Air probably gives the best built-in mic audio performance of any computer on the market today.

QT Pro can be the easiest video app to use of all mentioned. I use video to record music ideas so I need something that I can click a button and go with. QuikFlix is an Automator utility I created for true one-press recording for QT Pro users. I keep it on my dock. When an idea strikes, I click on it and it opens a new QuickTime Movie Recording and starts rolling immediately. The quality setting is whatever you've chosen in QT Pro's preferences. Click the link to get it. It's free.

No I mean it. It's free.

No I don't want your email address. Really.

No I don't want to guilt you into a donation. I don't want anything for it.

Look, it a free lunch. Really. I made it for myself and threw it up here figuring someone may find it useful as well.

Okay, this is how it is. I know this is the only thing in your life that's really been free with no expectations on my part. but I'm not kidding.

Really.