Tips for importing lots of DV video over many years

[kitenski]

Hi all,

I've recently bought myself my first Mac with an aim to import and edit many years of DV tape I have.

I rather naively thought iMovies would help with this, and I duely auto imported the whole of my first tape. This scanned a number of holidays over 2001, 2002 and 2003.

Despite ticking "start a new event for each day", iMovies simply imported the whole lot into one event.

So I did some digging and found Foottrack, which does seem to "remember" the recorded date when importing, but once again if I import this into iMovies it lumps it all together.

So to try and break this down into simple questions

1. Apart from manually, how can I take a DV tape and import it into clips, each clip being sorted by day of recording, or at least month!
2. Is there any way to get iMovies to sort by recording date?
3. Is there anything else obvious I'm missing?

The other factor is I really want to avoid spending money on this, the Mac itself already set me back a fair amount!

Cheers,

Greg

 

[Keebler]

Hi all,

I've recently bought myself my first Mac with an aim to import and edit many years of DV tape I have.

I rather naively thought iMovies would help with this, and I duely auto imported the whole of my first tape. This scanned a number of holidays over 2001, 2002 and 2003.

Despite ticking "start a new event for each day", iMovies simply imported the whole lot into one event.

So I did some digging and found Foottrack, which does seem to "remember" the recorded date when importing, but once again if I import this into iMovies it lumps it all together.

So to try and break this down into simple questions

1. Apart from manually, how can I take a DV tape and import it into clips, each clip being sorted by day of recording, or at least month!
2. Is there any way to get iMovies to sort by recording date?
3. Is there anything else obvious I'm missing?

The other factor is I really want to avoid spending money on this, the Mac itself already set me back a fair amount!

Cheers,

Greg

foottrack helps break your dv tapes by stop/start and then you can import into imovie. not sure if it marks the date though.

 

[ftaok]

I think your missing something obvious here.

iMovie'08 does separate each day into its own event. Then they get sorted by year.

Look at your iMovie window. Next to each year, there should be a small triangle. Click it and it will expand that year into each individual event. NOTE - iMovie slows down a little when the years get expanded, so when you're done, hit the triangle again to collapse the events.

ft

 

[kitenski]

I think your missing something obvious here.

iMovie'08 does separate each day into its own event. Then they get sorted by year.

Look at your iMovie window. Next to each year, there should be a small triangle. Click it and it will expand that year into each individual event. NOTE - iMovie slows down a little when the years get expanded, so when you're done, hit the triangle again to collapse the events.

ft

the problem is, when I imported some holidays from 2001, 2002 and 2003, it put them under the date and year of the actual import, not the recording day. Are you saying clicking the triangle would magicallly move these into the actual recorded year???

 

[ftaok]

the problem is, when I imported some holidays from 2001, 2002 and 2003, it put them under the date and year of the actual import, not the recording day. Are you saying clicking the triangle would magicallly move these into the actual recorded year???

OK, I see what you're saying. If I can remember correctly (I'm not on my Mac right now), when you import video, the Events will be called (by default) something like "2008-02-12 Day 1 ... Day 2 ... Day 3 ... " etc.

That's just the name of the event. You can rename it whatever you want. The actual footage date will still be intact. I think they are still sorted by year. If your video was shot in 2001, 2002, etc. you should have a corresponding "year" in the Event Library.

Here's a picture (from Apple's website).

ft

 

[Flynnstone]

I haven't had this problem with iMovie. I did have corruption problems on my PowerMac G5. I found FootTrack to work great at cataloging all my video. It is very reliable.
I'll keep an eye for his other problem.

 

[kitenski]

Nope, it doesn't seem to take into account the date of the actual recording at all for me

This is in imovie 08.

Here's a screenshot of stuff I shot in 1998, as you can see it has put it into the days I actually captured, not the days I shot!

 

[kitenski]

aha the plot thickens!

The really old stuff doesn't appear to be captured by iMovie correctly (it was shot on an older camcorder)

However newer stuff does get split into the date of actual recording.

So it appears from Footbrake that the date/time is there in the real old recordings, it just appears to get ignored by iMovie!

regards,

Greg

 

[Flynnstone]

iMovie ('08) doesn't feel real sturdy to me just yet.

How many tapes to import? are they all miniDV? Do you have an external hard drive?

 

[kitenski]

It's about 8 tapes I think!! I'm reckoning 5 or 6 are with the new camcorder that comes across ok, so all in all not too bad....