iMove Question. QUICK!!!

[bowens]

I am supposed to edit a video for Vacation Bible School at my church. The camcorder that did the recording is a Canon DC10. It records to the mini dvds. I can't put those in my Mac Mini. The camcorder uses USB to transfer to the computer. Will iMovie import video through USB? If not I don't know what I am going to do. I tried to rip and convert the video on a Windows machine but the quality was terrible. Help!

 

[gkarris]

I am supposed to edit a video for Vacation Bible School at my church. The camcorder that did the recording is a Canon DC10. It records to the mini dvds. I can't put those in my Mac Mini. The camcorder uses USB to transfer to the computer. Will iMovie import video through USB? If not I don't know what I am going to do. I tried to rip and convert the video on a Windows machine but the quality was terrible. Help!

I got this one...

USB transfers the files directly onto the computer, as DVD camcorders encode in DVD's MPEG-2. Some may have a Firewire port and the camcorder will change it to DV for import into a computer. iMovie only supports DV.

Here's what you can do (I do this sometimes when I have a DVD instead of the DV Tapes):

1. You must use the camcorder's USB port to your Mac, as Macs tend to not support the mini-DVDs. It shows up as a drive on your computer.
2. Use Handbreak to rip the movie from the DVD. Use MPEG-4, 2000 bit rate, 640x480, de-interlace picture.
3. After the rip, you have an MPEG-4 .mov that you can use in iLife.

I just did this for our church to make a DVD about our Africa church partnership...

enjoy...

 

[bowens]

Thank you. Should I use handbrake or Mac the Ripper? I've heard good stuff about mtr.

 

[gkarris]

Thank you. Should I use handbrake or Mac the Ripper? I've heard good stuff about mtr.

MTR is for taking encrypted DVDs and placing an unecrypted version on your hard drive, but still in MPEG-2.

You need Handbreak to rip the DVD and re-encode to MPEG-4....

Camcorder DVDs are not encrypted anyways...