Hello. I have a friend in another state who wants me to edit some footage she took with a mini dv video camera. I plan on using imovie 3, and she wants to send me the data on dvd, or ftp to import to imovie. She is using windows xp and basically has no software to do anything. What can she do to get it into the computer in a format I can use?
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- Thread starter davidwes
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Do you have access to a mini-DV camcorder? Perhaps one that a friend/colleague has.
If so, get her to send the tape to you, stick it in the DV cam and connect it up.
If not, then see if she can export it in XP as DV format (which will give you the best quality) - I assume Windows Moviemaker must have that option. And burn that as a data DVD so that there's no compression. It may take a few DVDs since an hour of footage is about 13GB. If she has to bring it in as an AVI or MPEG, then you'd have to do some conversion when you get it to your Mac to turn it into something that iMovie will see.
One of the problems you're going to face is the size of the clips. iMovie 3 only see clips up to 2GB - if she imports the file onto her PC and exports it as anything, you're going to end up with a very large file. That's also going to make it tricky to edit. One of the benefits of iMovie is the ability to import in lots of small clips (each time the camcorder paused) so you can arrange things more easily.
If so, get her to send the tape to you, stick it in the DV cam and connect it up.
If not, then see if she can export it in XP as DV format (which will give you the best quality) - I assume Windows Moviemaker must have that option. And burn that as a data DVD so that there's no compression. It may take a few DVDs since an hour of footage is about 13GB. If she has to bring it in as an AVI or MPEG, then you'd have to do some conversion when you get it to your Mac to turn it into something that iMovie will see.
One of the problems you're going to face is the size of the clips. iMovie 3 only see clips up to 2GB - if she imports the file onto her PC and exports it as anything, you're going to end up with a very large file. That's also going to make it tricky to edit. One of the benefits of iMovie is the ability to import in lots of small clips (each time the camcorder paused) so you can arrange things more easily.