Will the Canon VIXIA HV30 work for me?

[w00t5000]

I'm on a 12" Powerbook G4 Mac laptop, and I use iMovie HD 6.0.3

[spinnerlys]

As said here (http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/non-linear-editing-mac/41801-hdv-fce-firewire-speed-powerbook-g4.html), your PowerBook is at the bottom of the specs required to cut HDV footage. Also the camera records a MPEG-2 stream to the tape, iMovie will convert it to AIC (Apple Intermediate Codec) for better editing. The data rate will be around 100 Mbps (12.5 MByte/s), so you need a fast hard external FireWire hard drive, and a good processor.

I once used to play HDV footage on a Core2Duo iMac with 2GHz, and the CPU was up to 50-70% usage.

So don't expect any wonders with your G4.

A white MacBook would do better.

[w00t5000]

As said here (http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/non-linear-editing-mac/41801-hdv-fce-firewire-speed-powerbook-g4.html), your PowerBook is at the bottom of the specs required to cut HDV footage. Also the camera records a MPEG-2 stream to the tape, iMovie will convert it to AIC (Apple Intermediate Codec) for better editing. The data rate will be around 100 Mbps (12.5 MByte/s), so you need a fast hard external FireWire hard drive, and a good processor.

I once used to play HDV footage on a Core2Duo iMac with 2GHz, and the CPU was up to 50-70% usage.

So don't expect any wonders with your G4.

A white MacBook would do better.

So are you saying that the footage would be slow and take up a lot of space? Then what would be ideal for my computer if I wanted the highest quality I could get, without requiring too much external hard drive space?

[spinnerlys]

If you're editing with AIC, 1min of footage will take up 1GB of space, so an external FireWire drive should be on your purchasing list too.

I don't know of another way editing with iMovie and HDV footage, as HDV is using the MPEG-2 codec to compress the footage, and MPEG-2 is not meant for editing, as it only stores every 15th frame and the in between frames are approximations of changes between frames - nothing a good editing software likes.

As for CPU speed, you could give it a try, by renting a HDV camera and capturing the footage, or kindly asking a friend or even a store with HDV camera, if you could capture one or two minutes of HDV footage with iMovie.

But I still think you will not have a fluent editing with HDV and your old G4.

Some useful information regarding HDV: http://www.vasst.com/index.php?option=com_xfaq&Itemid=87

Another way to see if you'll be able to edit HDV footage would be to download a 1080p or 720p trailer from Apple and convert it via MPEG Streamclip or QT to a video using the AIC maybe, and then import the result into iMovie.

But you may also see that even playing the highly compressed .h264 trailers might but your Mac to the knees, but that may be due to encoding the trailer.