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migulic

macrumors member
Original poster
Mar 25, 2008
76
0
Hello,

As a school project I have to make a short movie, one of a few minutes. The school requires us to do all the editing on Windows Movie Maker (since this is all they have), and most other people will be working with either hard drive cameras or still cameras with video functionality. I, however, will be using a miniDV camera (since that is the best what I have).

Now, the problem: we would have about half an hour of footage which would need to be transferred onto the school computers. Those do have FireWire ports - but 4-pin, and I don't have any 4-pin cables. Also, capturing this in class would take too much time, since we're going to be working under time constraints.

So my plan was to capture the footage into DV format at home, using iMovie 06/08 (I do not have any PCs capable of this task) and my iMac. Then I wanted to dump this onto my 8 GB iPod nano (which I would format for Windows) and take it to school that way (using the iPod in disk mode). Is this possible? Would Windows Movie Maker accept iMovie-captured DV files? Would an 8GB iPod be enough for 30 mins of footage? Or is there a better solution to my problem?

Thanks a lot
 
You should ask this in a Windows forum or check the feature, if any, of that program. I would suggest rather you speak with your teacher about editing it on your mac since it's editing that they should be teaching you and not how to use a silly program like that.
 
You should ask this in a Windows forum or check the feature, if any, of that program. I would suggest rather you speak with your teacher about editing it on your mac since it's editing that they should be teaching you and not how to use a silly program like that.

Thanks, I will do that. Editing it at home isn't an option since we'll doing this with 5 people and it would be difficult to get them all at my house.

They're using that since that's all they have and since it is very easy to use. It's not like they don't accept Macs or anything - my teacher actually makes a lot of amateur movies. and he uses Final Cut Express
 
Why not just capture the footage in a raw DV format and burn the unedited .DV file to CD or DVD? You can capture this footage with whatever software you have on your Mac--Quicktime Pro if you've got it or just iMovie.

All you'd have to do is import the file on the Windows machine and do your project.

If you don't have a working burner, as long as your school allows you to connect external devices, you can just copy the file from your iPod directly to the Windows hard drive and work from there. You don't need any special compatibility between Windows Movie Maker and iPods.
 
I think if all your doing at home is shifting the data from a camera to ipod its not disallowed, your not editing!

Anyway, i recently made a small 1min 40secs video, and the footage was around 7gb for all the footage, unedited it was around 20mins of footage, but was crudely chopped down when taking it from the mini dv, probably around 10 mins worth, i cant remember the exact details now, my point is, i dont think an 8gb ipod will be big enough.

Portable harddrive is the best option imo,

have you exported the data off your dv onto hdd yet? it'll only take aslong as the footage lasts in imovie. try it, see how big it is. until you do that you dont know if you can move it, if it was 10gb worth, would it be viable to do 2 journeys to move 7gb and 3gb worth?
 
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