Importing MiniDV w/iMovie - Best way for archival purposes?

[cz9h3d]

I've got about 25 miniDV tapes I want to import in order to archive them for future editing. What is the best way to bring them in? I started the process a while back, and believe I left iMovie in "automatic" mode. Each clip was imported as an individual DV file. I believe it's using the tape timecode to accomplish this.

However, on some of the tapes I ended up with a bunch of 0.1s clips. Obviously these are pretty much impossible to work with. Maybe my tapes are starting to get old/degrade, hence my desire to get back to work and figure out the best way to bring them in. Should I bring them in on "manual" mode? Will this bring the tape in as a single MiniDV file I can break up later when I edit?

Any advantage to using FCPX to perform this (i.e. 30 day trial)?

thanks....

 

[Dave Braine]

iMovie usually splits up DV imports into separate clips by detecting when the camcorder has started/stopped recording. It may well be that your tapes have some problems.

 

[senseless]

Those microclips are probably glitches between when the camera was shut off and restarted. Final Cut has problems with these also.