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iPad MiniDV TRANSFER
- Thread starter Eric Hyde
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List what equipment you have in regards to your cassettes.
Be specific as to model and manufacturer and I’m sure someone will chime in with suggestions.
There's a Lighting to USB Camera Adapter for iPad. If you were able to connect that camera to your iMac via USB-A, then you can plug that same USB-A cable into the Lightning to USB adapter.
MiniDV (mini Digital Video) cameras generally had Firewire (400Mb) connections and Mac users would connect and download the videos directly in DV format into the older versions of iMovie. The only way is to get hold of any Mac with a Firewire 400Mb connection or Firewire 800Mb connection with a FW400 to FW800 adapter and download it into iMovie. There is no way to connect anything other than an SD card reader or very few USB devices directly to an iPad in this manner as it's USB only (exception of the USB C iPad Pros). At this point there's no point trying to get the footage onto an iPad, not just because of the hastle but I don't think iPads support .dv files and also as they it is a lossless format the bit rate and therefore files are very large.
If your Sony camera has an iLink port, it's Firewire and your iMac likely had that as well (depends on how old your iMac is). Do you still have an older Mac around with a Firewire port? That would be the easiest way to transfer your videos. They'll mostly likely be .MOV uncompressed files, and will be quite big but iMovie should have no problem recognizing them.