Time code info on DV_AVI files?

Hi, all, new to the Mac and iMovie application and trying to edit some old home movies. Last year, my wife got me a new hard-drive based camcorder and we offloaded our old Sony Digital8. Before we sold that, I imported all the tapes we had into DV-AVI on my old Vista laptop and did some editing using Pinnacle software. I only did maybe two of the tapes before the laptop died, starting my path to my new MBP, so now I was going to start the editing again using iMovie. One thing I haven't been able to replicate, though, is grabbing the original time code information out of the DV-AVI file on the Mac.

Using Pinnacle Studio, when I imported a DV-AVI file, it would automatically create scenes based on when the time-code changed. So, I recorded my kid doing something cute on 3/25/02, stopped the camera, then did another recording two days later. The Pinnacle software would not only split this big hour-long DV-AVI file into parts based on the camera start-stop points, but it would also tell me what that time code was so I could see now when I recorded it. Important for doing a DVD and saying, "See, Alex was walking when he was 6 months old!", hard to remember the dates without being able to see that meta-data.

That being said, I've only opened iMovie once and tried to import one of the DV-AVI files, and it created scenes about every minute or so (a lot of scenes for an hour long AVI). Is there a way to have it look at that time code, and at least be able to tell me when a segment was recorded?

Andy

 

Well, I actually imported the video using the Vista movie import thingy, not the Pinnacle software. I couldn't get the Pinnacle software to work right, so I just used what was native in Windows. The Pinnacle Studio software would recognize the TC info off the AVI file, though, and I used a demo once of the Adobe Premier Elements software on Windows that could see the TC data but was very limited in how I could access it. I thought that information was stored within the DV_AVI metadata, but maybe since it was captured on a Windows system the TC data can only be read by a Windows app? Wow, that would really stink...

Now, that being said, if I were to import those Digital8 tapes into the Macbook Pro / iMovie directly, should I be able to see the metadata on when they were recorded? If so, then I'm off to eBay to buy a cheap Digital8 camcorder and re-import those old tapes.