From my experience, the iPod nano makes a great video camcorder, but there are a few things I've discovered that may help.
WHEN SHOOTING:
1. Watch your fingers! It's easy to cover the lens with them while holding the nano. Practice using all your fingertips along the top edge without letting any fingers dangle down on the other side. Or hold the nano on the other end, away from the lens completely, with your hand 'bracketing' the screen.
2. In bright surroundings, it's sometimes difficult to see the little counter and blinking red light in the display that tells you that you're recording. The glossy screen often hides these indicators with reflected glare. You can start recording at some other angle, so that you can see the screen clearly, confirm that the recording has, in fact, been started, then shift to the shot you want when you're sure you're actually recording. But be careful! You could change the orientation (see #3, the next item below). You can trim the extra footage away using iMovie, later, when editing.
3. Be careful when shooting down at something below (on the ground, for instance) or up at something above. If you tip the nano slightly the wrong way, you'll record an image in "portrait" mode instead of "landscape" mode. If you have to edit this clip in with other clips that were shot in the normal "landscape" mode, you could get some unappealing results! If this happens to you, you'll have to rotate the clip later in iMovie; the rotation controls in iPhoto won't work.
WHEN UPLOADING:
1. When you plug in the iPod, iTunes probably wakes up. But iTunes is pretty useless for working with videos you shot on your nano. The only thing to do here is select the iPod nano from the column at the left, then check the "Enable disk use" option checkbox near the center of the screen:
Don't ask me why they called it that. I guess they couldn't think of a better name for it. What it does is tell the Mac to "allow other applications to 'see' the iPod nano and access its contents."
2. Launch iPhoto next. Select the nano from the list at the left, under "Devices:"
You should see all the videos on your iPod appear in the main section of the screen. These videos are still on the nano, not on your computer's hard drive! To "import" them, grab one and drag it up to the "Events" section at the upper left of the window:
You can select more than one clip on the nano at one time (shift click or drag across the clips to select multiple ones), and drag the entire flotilla of them up to the Events line and they will all be copied in (and all erased from your nano, if you desire) in a single step.
You will not see a little green "plus" mark but your clip(s) will be added to events nonetheless. When the copying process is done (pretty quickly, actually), you will be asked if you wish to remove the "photos" (videos, actually) from your nano (which it refers to as the "camera"). I always say 'yes' because this is the easiest way I have found to remove videos from the nano.
(Note: Specifically, although the latest version of iMovie can now directly import videos, it does not offer the option of deleting them from the nano, once imported. It also turns out that "Image Capture," a little known utility (see Utilities folder within the Applications folder) can also be used to import videos, and it also offers the option of deleting videos once imported, but you must find the checkbox for this option before importing, as it won't ask you with an alert box afterward.)
Alternatively, in iPhoto, either select some videos, then click the "Import Selected" button or just click the "Import All" button (both at the lower right corner of the window) to start the import process. The same alert box will appear (asking if you want to delete the 'photos' from the 'camera') when importing has completed.
Note: as of mid November 2009, with the latest updates from Apple, now running under Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6.2), even the remove alert box in iPhoto will not always delete videos from the nano after importing(!) I have reported this bug to Apple. The work-around is to quit iPhoto, but leave the nano 'mounted' (i.e "connected" - that is: don't eject it), so you can see its icon on your desktop. Double click on the nano's icon on the desktop, and a window will open showing its contents.
Open the DCIM folder, then the 000APPLE folder within that. A list of your videos, shown as ".mp4" files will appear, along with some support files intermingled with them. Drag all these documents to the trash, then empty the trash. Make sure you have imported your videos first befoe you do this! (or you will lose them forever). Then close the window, click on the nano's icon on the desktop and choose "Eject" from the "File" menu to 'disconnect' it.
3. Launch iMovie. You can access your clips directly by looking for the iPhoto line at the left, in your event library:
First, you will see an alert box that says iMovie needs to create 'thumbnails' for the newly imported videos. Thumbnails are a string of tiny frames to represent your video that iMovie will use to show your videos to you during the editing process (as if a 'filmstrip' of frames that you can use to 'cut' etc.) This may take a minute or two.
Once that's done, you can either use your clips directly in a project, just by dragging them up into the project, OR you can drag them down into other events you create in iMovie below that (below the 2009 folder in the illustration, above).
4. When sharing:
For some reason, iMovie appeared to upload completed videos directly up to YouTube. But later I found that the movies never made it to YouTube. So I adopted the practice of exporting the movie as a stand-alone quicktime movie, then opening YouTube and asking it to upload the movie manually. I have adopted this as my standard practice for now, so I have not tried to get iMovie to do this since experiencing this problem, so I don't know if Apple has fixed the problem in subsequent updates.
If you have other hints or suggestions about using the nano or iMovie, please let me know! See our contacts page for details.