Shooting and Editing on an iPad without using iTunes

An interesting question was posted the other day on this post.

Basically, the question is if there is a way to shoot footage and edit it on an iPad without having to use iTunes to sync or in fact, any computer at all: just cameras and an iPad with iMovie.

Now, I don't have all the stuff on-hand to test this but this is what I would try first:

1. Set up your iPad with iMovie.
2. Buy the Camera Connection Kit from Apple.

"The iPad Camera Connection Kit gives you two ways to import photos and videos from a digital camera: using your camera’s USB cable or directly from an SD card. iPad and the Camera Connection Kit support standard photo formats, including JPEG and RAW, along with SD and HD video formats, including H.264 and MPEG-4."

3. Buy or find a camera that shoots H.264 or MPEG-4 to SD cards. Something like the Kodak Zi8 perhaps (just guessing here)?

4. Shoot, then pop the SD card out of the camera and into the Camera Connection Kit that's plugged into your iPad.

I don't know for sure but you may have to reduce the quality (bit rate) or size of the video you shoot so the iPad can handle it. Again, I can't test this at the moment.

5. Ingest with iMovie? (I don't have the stuff here to test this, just thinking aloud)
6. Edit in iMovie

As for output I just don't know if the Camera Connection Kit is something iMovie can export to. The new iPad2 can easily plug into a TV, monitors and projectors via an HDMI cable apparently so there is a way to show videos to groups.

And there are some App Store apps that let you monkey around with video, meaning copy it to SD cards and the like but I've never tried them.

Another option would be to use AirPlay but I that requires an AppleTV or display that supports AirPlay.

Or you could use DropBox, perhaps, to upload your videos to where ever you need them. DropBox needs to be installed on the iPad at least.

Apple has a Knowledge Base article on iPad file sharing here.

And some clever people have noticed that the new version of iMovie can run on the iPad1.

Unfortunately I don't have the hardware here to test this out. Let me know how far off I am :)

UPDATE:

Apparently file names need to be formatted in a certain way (to import images and video clips into iMovie in some cases) and in a certain folder in most cases. More info is here.