Hi All,
I looked through a lot of Mac related forums in search of a way to effectively edit home video on MacBook; although there's a lot of resources available, I couldn't find some of the answers I was looking for, so after a lot of trial and error had to learn to do it myself. Now I thought I'd share my approach.
I've purchased a new Alu. Macbook at the end of November knowing that it lacks Firewire port and that to edit my home movies I'll have to solve a problem of <My Sony MiniDV camcorder with Firewire> and <My new MacBook with no such thing>. My initial impulse was to purchase a new camcorder altogether and be done with it. But as I started looking closer at camcorders available, I quickly realized that the HD Flash camcorders are just becoming popular and the technology, although already great, not very mature. Hence I had to come up with a way to use my old MiniDV camcorder.
The whole process is explained below:
1. First you need to capture the video from the camcorder. Since MacBook doesn't have the FireWire port, I purchased a cheap FireWire PCMCIA card ($35) for my old IBM A20m ThinkPad and set it up to capture video in .avi format. You can use any software you find suitable, but I found the latest version of VirtualDub very effective. This piece of software is absolutely amazing, very lightweight and with a lot of functionality, you can apply different filters while capturing video, etc. It is also absolutely free.
2. Once the video is captured, I copied it on my MacBook using a USB drive (the whole project was under 15G for approximately one hour of video.
3. Although you could try using iMovie 8 or even iMovie 9, I couldn't find a way to produce a final product of a decent quality with iMovie 8 (you have to "publish" your project for iDVD to recognize it). By publishing it, not only you're introducing one unnecessary encoding step into the process that takes time to complete, there's no choice for iDVD, so the final quality suffers considerably.
4. I used iMovie HD (available free for those who purchased iLive 8. I imported all clips that I captured in the step 1, did all the cropping I wanted, applied transitions, added captions, etc. The amount of time you want to spend on this is the only constraint.
5. I used iDVD to burn my project on DVD. It turned out to be very simple:
This is my first post on MacForums and I hope that somebody will find it useful.
I looked through a lot of Mac related forums in search of a way to effectively edit home video on MacBook; although there's a lot of resources available, I couldn't find some of the answers I was looking for, so after a lot of trial and error had to learn to do it myself. Now I thought I'd share my approach.
I've purchased a new Alu. Macbook at the end of November knowing that it lacks Firewire port and that to edit my home movies I'll have to solve a problem of <My Sony MiniDV camcorder with Firewire> and <My new MacBook with no such thing>. My initial impulse was to purchase a new camcorder altogether and be done with it. But as I started looking closer at camcorders available, I quickly realized that the HD Flash camcorders are just becoming popular and the technology, although already great, not very mature. Hence I had to come up with a way to use my old MiniDV camcorder.
The whole process is explained below:
1. First you need to capture the video from the camcorder. Since MacBook doesn't have the FireWire port, I purchased a cheap FireWire PCMCIA card ($35) for my old IBM A20m ThinkPad and set it up to capture video in .avi format. You can use any software you find suitable, but I found the latest version of VirtualDub very effective. This piece of software is absolutely amazing, very lightweight and with a lot of functionality, you can apply different filters while capturing video, etc. It is also absolutely free.
2. Once the video is captured, I copied it on my MacBook using a USB drive (the whole project was under 15G for approximately one hour of video.
3. Although you could try using iMovie 8 or even iMovie 9, I couldn't find a way to produce a final product of a decent quality with iMovie 8 (you have to "publish" your project for iDVD to recognize it). By publishing it, not only you're introducing one unnecessary encoding step into the process that takes time to complete, there's no choice for iDVD, so the final quality suffers considerably.
4. I used iMovie HD (available free for those who purchased iLive 8. I imported all clips that I captured in the step 1, did all the cropping I wanted, applied transitions, added captions, etc. The amount of time you want to spend on this is the only constraint.
5. I used iDVD to burn my project on DVD. It turned out to be very simple:
a. Create a new project (NTSC, I used professional quality setting, 3:4)
b. Select the Theme you like (Revolution or any other)
c. Add Movie and select your project (created in iMovie HD) in the Media tab
d. At this point you can either burn the project directly to DVD or save it as an image file to be burned at a later time using disc utility.
6. Done!b. Select the Theme you like (Revolution or any other)
c. Add Movie and select your project (created in iMovie HD) in the Media tab
d. At this point you can either burn the project directly to DVD or save it as an image file to be burned at a later time using disc utility.
This is my first post on MacForums and I hope that somebody will find it useful.