iMovie 6 & iDVD: The Missing Manual

Importing Footage from Non-DV Tapes

We live in a transitional period. Millions of the world’s existing camcorders and VCRs require VHS, VHS-C, or 8 mm cassettes—that is, analog tapes instead of digital.

DV camcorders are rapidly catching up; they’re the only kind people buy these days. But in the meantime, potential video editors face a very real problem: how to transfer into iMovie the footage they shot before the DV era. Fortunately, this is fairly easy to do if you have the right equipment. You can take any of these four approaches, listed roughly in order of preference.

Note

When you use any of these approaches, iMovie won’t be able to chop up the video into individual scene clips automatically, as it does for DV tapes. That’s because old analog camcorders didn’t stamp every frame of every shot with an invisible time code, so iMovie doesn’t know when you stopped the camcorder.

Approach 1: Use a Recent Sony or Canon Camcorder

If you’re in the market for a new digital camcorder, here’s a great idea: Buy a Sony or Canon MiniDV camcorder. Most current models offer analog-to-digital passthrough conversion. In other words, the camcorder itself acts as a media converter that turns the signal from your old analog tapes into a digital one that you can record and edit in iMovie.

The footage never hits a DV tape. Instead, it simply plays from your older VCR or camcorder directly into the Macintosh. (Not all Sony and Canon camcorders have this feature, so ask before you buy. And on some models, ...