iMovie won't read video from Fuji Discs?

[teachthd]

I recently purchased a Macbook to handle home movies and photos. I use a Sony DCR-DVD105 Mini-disc camcorder and I recently bought a Sony external drive/burner to import the discs into iMovie. The videos that I took on Sony brand discs opened right away in iMovie. The cheaper Fuji discs however will not open. I tried to use Handbrake and now the videos will open in iTunes but still won't open in iMovie. Any help would be appreciated. Type slowly, I'm not very tech savvy.

 

[-DH]

Handbrake is the wrong tool for this type of job. It was designed to convert DVD-Video into other delivery formats - NOT to convert for editing. iMovie doesn't work with MPEG-4 natively.

You can use DVDxDV or MPEG Streamclip to convert the DVD's VOB files into an editable format. For iMovie, that would be a dv stream (.dv).

As for the Fuji discs, are you absolutely certain that you finalized the discs in-camera before trying them on your Mac?

-DH

 

[teachthd]

I did finalize the discs and they work in my DVD player and will play on my computer, I just can't get them to open in iMovie. They will play in iTunes (which I don't understand why?) and in iDVD.

So do I need to download another program?

 

[-DH]

I did finalize the discs and they work in my DVD player and will play on my computer, I just can't get them to open in iMovie. They will play in iTunes (which I don't understand why?) and in iDVD.

So do I need to download another program?

iMovie isn't a DVD player. You'll have to convert the DVD's footage to a format that works natively in iMovie.

DVD-Video is made of highly compressed MPEG-2 video that has been multiplexed with the audio and specially formatted as VOB files. iMovie cannot edit those natively.

-DH