iMovie 08 Help

[mark-mcd]

Hi,

I will try to keep this as simple as possible (and hope this is the right area of the forum!)

I have purchased one of the infamous Easycap USB devices to record video from a VCR, in order to stick them on DVD. The device works great, but the .MPG format I have imported the file in does not seem to be compatible with iMovie 08 on my iMac.

What is the best quality format that iMovie supports? I was hoping to be able to import the video (2 x 3 hour tapes) and use iMovie to cut edit the footage, stick in dates, etc, before burning to DVD. Can this be done without any quality loss?

Hard drive space is not really an issue as I have plenty drive space but will iMovie be able to carry out this task?

Thanks in advance.

 

[spinnerlys]

According to the home page, the device can record the video using a DV codec, but with .avi as a container.

.mpg is also only a container of MPEG codecs, which are highly insufficient for editing applications like iMovie.

If you can record the video with a DV codec, and the container/file suffix is .avi, you can use MPEG-Streamclip to convert the video to a QT file (.mov) encoded with the Apple DV codec.
DV codecs are suited for editing, as they safe every frame, which does not happen with MPEG codec as the only store every 15th/XYth frame.

Also know that video encoded with a DV codec uses approximately 12GB/hour of HDD space.

DV stands for Digital Video and is made for videos recorded with a DV camera that stores its footage on a (mini) DV tape.

 

[mark-mcd]

Thanks for the reply. What are the file formats that iMovie can accept for editing, and what is the best quality? Would converting from avi to mov file formats not result in a drop in quality? I have almost 600GB free so if it's going to take up a lot of space it's not too big a worry.

I supose what I want to know is what is the best way to get these tapes onto DVD without much (if any) quality loss.

Thanks