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Can view DV files with quicktime but not imovie

K

kudukudu

macrumors regular
Original poster
Oct 24, 2007
198
4
Hi, I have "upgraded" from my old 2008 mac pro (running el capitan 10.11.6 and imovie 9.0.9) to the latest mac mini. I am running Catalina 10.15.7 with iMovie 10.2.2 on the mac mini with an external drive. I have noticed with both machines I cannot view old media in the *.DV format imported from camcorder video tapes from approximately 15 years ago in iMovie, but on both machines I can go directly to finder and open the *.dv files using quicktime. I am aware of apple dropping support for 32 bit codecs and media incompatibility in Catalina and big sur, but I see they claim to continue supporting HDV. for the heck of it I loaded a copy of my imovie library into mojave and did the check media compatibility operation which converted some AVI files, but it did not flag the DV files. For the life of me I can't figure out why apple quicktime can play the *.dv clips but imovie cannot. what irks me is that i imported these clips from the camcorder tapes directly into imovie 15 years ago. Is my only option to go through each directory one by one with something like handbrake to convert these DV files into some clips which can be viewed in imovie? should i just move to a better piece of software and ditch imovie? I am not trying to do anything fancy. I just want a visual archive where i can see and play all of my home movie clips.

Note I did a command+I in quicktime and my Dv files show as DV/DVCPRO. If I am not mistaken this should be supported by MacOS Catalina.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions
 
Last edited:
iMovie is an editing program, not a media management or viewer program. While it IMO should support all codecs macOS in some way natively supports anyway, as you’ve found, it just doesn’t.

Though if you want to convert all the files, you don’t need handbrake. You can mark all the files directly in Finder and select “Encode Media Files” directly from Finder to transcode them. - At least I have that option on my machine, but I’m actually not entirely sure if it’s there by default or if Final Cut adds that to the Services menu with the Pro Media Codecs install
 
Dave Braine said:
Can you import the DV files into iMovie?
Click to expand...
Wondering about this as well. I have a number of iMovie projects in a similar state - imported from DV tapes. The projects have a number of clipX.mov files in them, After opening in QT, they get converted it seems to a newer .mov format. Before going through the hundreds of clips - can those be used in a project in the new iMovie (for Mojave at least)?

Does this lose anything? I.e., should I try to reimport these clips from the original DV tapes?
 
Dave Braine said:
It shouldn't do, especially if you use the original imported video rather than open the clips with QT and then use the "converted" clips.
Click to expand...
Thanks - I actually figured out how to get them into .dv format - they in fact were already, but were opening with quicktime. Adding the .dv extension fixed that.

Now that I have them in .dv format that's readable - I can import into new iMovie without loss, right? Then edit and so forth there and figure the least lossy output format for final movies . . . yes?
 
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