DEPENDING ON WHAT YOU want to watch and where you want to watch it, you can get movies moving on your iPad in a variety of ways. Here are the common methods (besides shooting your own, as explained on Shoot Your Own Videos):

GOT VIDEO IN ITUNES that you want to move to your iPad? Here are a few ways to get those movies, TV shows, and wacky pet clips over to your tablet:

Getting Videos Into iTunes

While the iTunes Store is chock-full of video choices, sometimes you want to add your own flicks to your iTunes library. No problem, just choose File→Add to Library to locate and import your files, or drag the files from your desktop and drop them anywhere in iTunes’ main window. Once you get videos into iTunes, you can play them there or copy them to your iPad.

Another way to add videos to iTunes is to drag them into the “Automatically Add to iTunes” folder. This clever folder analyzes each file’s name and—based on its extension—shelves it in the right spot. You find the auto-folder not through iTunes, but by navigating your system files. In Windows, it’s usually at C:/Music→iTunes→iTunes Media→Automatically Add to iTunes. On Macs, it’s at Home→Music→iTunes→iTunes Media→Automatically Add to iTunes. (Creating a desktop shortcut for the folder makes adding video even quicker.) If iTunes can’t categorize a file, it dumps it into a subfolder called Not Added.

TO PLAY A VIDEO on your iPad, tap open the Videos icon on the Home screen. On the next screen, tap the tab for the type of video you want to watch: Movies, TV Shows, Music Videos, or a movie shared on your home network (Authorize Computers for iTunes and Home Sharing); video podcasts are in the Podcasts app (Play iPad Videos on Your TV). Then find the item you want to watch and tap its title or the Play button to start the show. (There’s a Store button in the lower-left corner if you want to buy new stuff.)

But how do you run the show when your gadget has no physical controls? Easy; the playback buttons are on the screen. When you watch video, anything else on the screen distracts you, so Apple hides the controls. Tap the screen once to make them appear and again to make them disappear. Here’s what the controls do:

MOVIES ON THE IPAD are great, but watching them on a bigger screen is often more gratifying—especially if everyone in the house wants to watch. You can put all those movies and videos up on your TV screen—you just need to connect your iPad to your television set. What you connect it with depends on the hardware you have.

First of all, if you have at least a second-generation Apple TV (the little black square one), you can use its built-in wireless capability, called AirPlay, to grab video you stream from your iPad and display it on the big screen at up to 1080p resolution, the best available. (Of course, your actual resolution depends on the video’s and your TV’s native resolution.) In fact, with an iPad 2 or later and iOS 5 and later, you can mirror anything on an HDTV, including video games, as Video Mirroring shows.

But if you don’t have an Apple TV, you can use good old-fashioned cables to connect your iPad. Today’s TV sets (and those fancy AV receivers that connect all the components in your entertainment center) usually offer a few types of video port for connecting new gear. You can use component, composite, or VGA cables to tether your iPad to a TV or projector. And you can watch high-definition videos over an HDMI connection with a special adapter.

In late 2012, Apple replaced the wide 30-pin Dock Connector on the bottom of its iPhone, iPods, and iPads with a narrower 8-pin connector called a Lightning port. With new ports come new cables—and adapters for 30-pin ports to work with 8-pin cables. Before you buy an iPad cable, check the bottom edge of your tablet to see whether you need a 30-pin or an 8-pin.

And while Apple sells a $29 Lightning-to-30-pin adapter designed to let newer, Lightning-port iHardware work with docks and cables that have old 30-pin ports, the adapter does not support video output—so the adapter won’t work with older AV cables designed to work with the first three generations of iPad.

The easiest place to find any of these cables is the Apple Store (store.apple.com). Here, you’ll see the Apple Composite AV Cable for TVs that have older video inputs and the older Apple 30-pin Dock Connector on the iPad. You can also find the Apple Component AV Cable, made for high-end TVs and widescreen sets that handle higher-quality video and audio connections. Each type of cable costs $40, but that includes an integrated AC adapter to power your iPad for a whole-weekend movie marathon.

If you use HDMI cables to connect high-definition components to your widescreen HDTV, you can use Apple’s $40 iPad-to-HDMI cable (called the Digital AV Adapter, shown right) to connect your 30-pin iPad to your TV and get HD playback from the tablet. A Digital AV Adapter for the Lightning connector is also for sale at store.apple.com, but sells for $50.

The Digital AV Adapter plugs into the iPad’s bottom port on one end and has an HDMI jack and a second dock connector on the other end (the latter in case you need to charge your iPad with its AC adapter while you watch). You don’t, however, get another white AC cube, so keep track of the power plug that came with your iPad. And you don’t get the HDMI cable that links the adapter to your TV, either.

The AV Adapter gives second- and third-generation iPad owners a special bonus, too: video output at up to 1080p resolution, the same one you get with AirPlay (Stream and Mirror Files with AirPlay). The adapter takes whatever’s on your iPad 2 or 2012 iPad screen and mirrors it on your TV. You can also use the AV Adapter with a first-generation iPad to show photos and videos, but you don’t get the screen-mirror effect—and it displays video at the lower-resolution (but still technically high-definition) 720p.

Whatever cable you use, the iPad senses when you connect it to a TV set and automatically pipes its video feed to the big screen, but there are some settings you can adjust at Home→Settings→Video. Here, you can turn on closed captioning for videos that include subtitles.

Once you get the iPad hooked up to play movies, be sure to select the alternate video source on your television set, just as you would to play a DVD or video game. Then call up the movie from the iPad’s library, press the Play button, pop up the corn, and enjoy the show from big screen to the bigger screen.

IN ADDITION TO PLAYING videos, the current crop of iPads can take and make high-definition videos using its built-in camera. The actual “shooting the video” part of the process can be a little clumsy because you have to hold the whole tablet up (and fairly steady) to snag decent footage—unless you’ve got it propped up on a table for a talking-head type show. But here’s how to channel your inner Scorsese the iPad way:

The recorded video is stored not in the iPad’s Videos app, but in the Photos app—look in the Camera Roll album and tap the clip’s thumbnail to play it.

Like the still camera, you can tap an area of the screen to adjust the exposure, but there’s no zoom feature for video. You can hold the iPad vertically or horizontally to shoot video, but portrait-shot clips may get letterboxed if you upload them to a site that displays video in the horizontal orientation.

AFTER ALL THAT HARD work, don’t you want to show off your video clips to friends and family? (If you want to edit your clips before sharing, turn the page.) When they’re good to go, here’s how to share.

Tap the button for the action you want to take.

You can also transfer your videos to your computer if you prefer to post, edit, or store them there. Connect your iPad to your Windows PC or Mac and use the Import command in your photo-organizer program (like Adobe Photoshop Elements or iPhoto) to copy videos over to your hard drive.

ONCE YOU GET THE hang of capturing video with the iPad (which, quite frankly, feels like shooting a movie with a ceiling tile until you get comfortable gripping and aiming the slab), your clips will begin to pile up in the Camera Roll. Some are simple enough to share (Share Your Video Clips) without any editing—the birthday girl blowing out the candles in one take or the dog showing his repertoire of fetching tricks. Others may need a little…help.

Look through them—do you have a video where all the good action is in the middle? You know, the one where the first 5 minutes consists of absolutely nothing but you coaxing an under-performing baby into demonstrating her agility with Cheerios. Or all those clips where the last 2 minutes show the inside of your tote bag because you forgot to turn off the camera? That stuff is easy to fix.

Here’s how to trim off the unnecessary parts from either end of a clip (you can’t edit within a clip unless you use a video-editing app, like iMovie for iPad, discussed on Edit Videos with iMovie):

While some videos can benefit from a few nips and tucks, some just can’t be saved—like that blurry action shot where you almost dropped the iPad while you were recording. If you preview a clip and realize it’s unusable, just tap the icon in the upper-right corner, and then tap Delete Video to free up some space on your iPad.

You can mass-delete from the Camera Roll screen, too. In iOS 6, just tap the Edit button (or the icon if you’re still using iOS 5) in the upper-right corner. Tap the unwanted clips, and then tap the red Delete button in the upper-left corner of the screen. Tap Delete Videos to confirm.

IPAD MODELS SINCE THE iPad 2, in conjunction with the basic video-editing tools in iOS 5, let you trim bad bits from the ends of a clip, but you may find that’s not enough. If you want to edit clips, stitch clips together, score background music, and add titles and Hollywood-style scene transitions, you need an app for that. When you get to the App Store, search for video editing. One app that pops up immediately is Apple’s own iMovie for iPad, which costs $5 and requires at least an iPad 2 to run. (If you have a Mac and use Apple’s iMovie software for OS X, the version for the iPad will seem familiar.)

For that measly five bucks, you get a portable post-production studio that lets you create professional-looking movies with your fingertips. With eight visual themes, a Precision Editor that lets you “cut” film clips together by tapping and dragging, and a collection of sound effects, iMovie turns your iPad into a portable video-editing workstation.

You can also create a trailer for your movie, add a soundtrack (including live narration or tunes from your music library), and upload your project directly to Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, or CNN iReport.

To get started with iMovie, open the app, tap the button, and then choose New Project or New Trailer. As in Hollywood, a “project” usually means a movie, and the app takes you right to a screen where you can get started pulling in the video clips on your iPad and arranging them in a timeline, as shown below.

The iMovie app not only lets you edit together your own mini-films, it also lets you create your own trailers from your clips. Again, you start with a few stock trailer styles (like “Bollywood” or “Superhero”) that include preformatted titles and theme music. You also get a storyboard (shown below) that breaks down the visual narrative of the trailer into bite-size chunks of screen time and coaches you through dragging the right types of clips into the trailer template.

With its various buttons to pull in photos, video clips, music, titles, and sound effects, the iPad edition of iMovie may feel a little overwhelming at first—especially if you’ve never worked with video-editing software. Apple knows you have questions, though, and includes an electronic help guide within the app that explains how to do everything. Just tap the at the top of the screen.

AS DISCUSSED IN Chapter 12, the iTunes Store now sells movies, TV shows, and music videos. You can also import your own home movies, downloaded movie trailers, and other videos into the iPad via iTunes, so long as the files have one of these file extensions at the end of their name: .mov, .m4v, or .mp4.

Other common video formats, like .avi or Windows Media Video (.wmv), won’t play back in iTunes, but you can convert them with Apple’s $30 QuickTime Pro software or any of the dozens of video-conversion programs floating around the Web. (If you’re unsure whether a file’s compatible, it’s always worth trying to drag it into iTunes’ main window and then choosing Advanced→Create iPad or Apple TV Version.)

Commercial DVD and Blu-ray discs marked as Ultraviolet offer a free digital copy you can use on your iPad. You can find details on this at www.uvvu.com.

Here are a few popular video-conversion tools that create ’Pad-able movies:

HAVING A PERSONAL MOVIE library with you at all times is great, but high-quality videos are huge. Sure, movie rentals from iTunes delete themselves when they expire, but what about your regular collection? A long movie can take up almost 2 gigabytes of your limited iPad drive space. And if you’re traveling with a full iPad and want to download a fresh flick for the plane, what do you do?

Fortunately, you can delete videos directly off the tablet—without having to link your iPad to your computer and turn off iTunes checkboxes to “unsync” them. (However, removing files through iTunes is another way to regain drive space, with the added advantage that the videos stay safely in your computer’s iTunes library, ready for you to sync to your iPad again when you want to watch.)

When you’re ready to lose a movie or two:

The selected video goes poof! off the iPad. If you synced the video from your computer through iTunes, there’s still a copy on your computer, so you can sync it back to your ’Pad if you miss it. To delete several videos at once, tap the Edit button at the top of the screen, and then tap the videos you want to delete. Tap Done when you finish.