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digital camcorder not recognized

CommonMan

CommonMan

macrumors regular
Original poster
Sep 27, 2006
140
0
Midwest
Just got a digital camcorder. Plugged in to the USB port of my Mac but it was not "recognized." When I go to disk utilities, you can find it as a removable disk. But, it is protected. I removed the protection on the camera but it still is not showing up as a hard drive on the Mac. The camcorder has a hard drive in it. It is supposed to show up as an external HD on the Mac. Why does it not?
What should i do?
 
If you have iMovie 7 it should recognize your USB video cam. Fire up iMovie but make sure to read the help menu because it may require a setting to be changed as iMovie is set by default to connect to firewire.
 
It may depend on the camera. If the camera has IEEE1394 (iLink, Firewire), then it may only let still photos be transferred via USB, and videos have to transfer over firewire. IOW, I don't think you can drag and drop video clips from the camera's hard drive to the computers. I think video has to actually be captured in iMovie.

If you have firewire on the video camera, plug THAT into your computer, bring up iMovie and go to "capture". You should see the device as something that iMovie is ready to capture from.
 
no firewire

A fire wire cable did not come with the camcorder and there is no mention of firewire in the manual. It speaks only of USB connection.

This is a Hitachi DZ-HS300A. It has a hard drive and can record to an 8cm DVD-R.

I don't think one can put an 8 cm DVD in an iMac - it will wreck it.
Even if I could, I should not have to go to this extra step. I will try seeing if I can get iMovie to "capture" the data on the HDD of the Camcorder.
 
CommonMan said:
A fire wire cable did not come with the camcorder and there is no mention of firewire in the manual. It speaks only of USB connection.

This is a Hitachi DZ-HS300A. It has a hard drive and can record to an 8cm DVD-R.

I don't think one can put an 8 cm DVD in an iMac - it will wreck it.
Even if I could, I should not have to go to this extra step. I will try seeing if I can get iMovie to "capture" the data on the HDD of the Camcorder.
Click to expand...

ok, no firewire on your camera. do you have iMovie 08? if you do, then it should work with it. if you have iMovie 06, then it will not work
 
In disk utility does the camera not have a mount option? It should just show up as a HDD like it does in Windows, the VRO files should be renamable to avi or mpg.
I am not sure why you would have to import the video in iMovie considering it isn't in a DV format.

Side note question: Do all HDD based camcorders not show up as eHDD's in OS X? Seems to completely remove the whole plus behind using a HDD based camcorder(ability to import without having to watch the whole movie again).
 
Hmac said:
The Hitachi DZ-HS300A isn't listed as one of the tapeless camcorders that is supported by iMovie 08.
Click to expand...

that doesn't mean that it won't work. i have a sony dvd-handycam that isn't on the list, but it still worked. (of course, the Hitachi still might not work)
 
twoodcc said:
that doesn't mean that it won't work. i have a sony dvd-handycam that isn't on the list, but it still worked. (of course, the Hitachi still might not work)
Click to expand...

I agree, it doesn't mean it won't work. But if you've done with the Hitachi what you did with the Sony, and the Hitachi still doesn't work.....well....
 
I still think that shouldn't make a difference, it should show up as an external disk like it seems to for all the other Mac users that had the camcorder. Something else is wrong with the OP's system if it isn't showing up as an external disk. Well either that or there is a setting on the camcorder that dictates if is shows up as a disk drive or not.
 
I've got an old version of iMovie (3.0.3). I don't want to spend any more money. I paid Apple 20 bucks today to get a version of Quicktime that will play Mpeg files and I'm not happy because I'm not getting any audio. I'm using the software that came with the camcorder to get the files off the camera and into the computer. At first, I could not do anything with the files because they were Mpeg 4 or something like that. I can check if that will help. I really don't want to spend a lot of time or money on this whole thing because it's not like I'm going to making movies. I just wanted to do some minor editing and be able to maybe put something on you tube or send a short clip to a friend. I thought Macs were supposed to make stuff like this easy.
 
I really don't want to spend a lot of time or money on this whole thing because it's not like I'm going to making movies. I just wanted to do some minor editing and be able to maybe put something on you tube or send a short clip to a friend
Click to expand...
Believe me, I understand about not wanting to invest a whole lot of money into a one-time thing like editing and uploading a single movie (especially since you just sank $20 into what I'm guessing is QTPro), but if you invested $350 into a camera that's been on the market for under a year, it seems petulant to expect it to work with software that is more than 4 years old and has gone through 4 revisions/updates. Plus, if you bought the camera, wouldn't it stand to reason that you plan to use the camera more than once?

iLife '08 is a nice software suite, and at $70, it's not going to break the bank.

Conversely, is the camera returnable? For $195, you can get a 60min Flip Video Camcorder and iLife '08 through Amazon. Granted, that doesn't help you with your current problem of extracting the video you already have.

Now, as for playing the mpeg4 clips with sound and picture, have you tried VLC?
 
I've got the same camera, and it doesn't appear to work with iLife 08 either. The video does indeed play with VLC (with sound) however, the picture is off (16:9, but it's stretched).

I am willing to bet that the ultimate solution isn't that difficult, however, I'm a relative newcomer to the whole video thing, so I don't know what it is off the top of my head.
 
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