[MacDV] Converting VHS Videos to DVD's

[Erica Sadun]

>A friend has purchased a Sony DV camera and has been copying VHS 
>footage into the camera and in turn, through to FCP4 on his iMac. 
>He is happy with the results, but is concerned that the amount of 
>work he has to do will create undue wear and tear on the transport 
>mechanism of his camera.   He does not want to purchase a conversion 
>unit such as Canopus as it will become redundant once he has copied 
>his VHS collection across to DVD.   His wife works as a teacher and 
>she took one of his VHS tapes to school and burnt it to DVD on a DVD 
>recorder there.    The resultant disc plays OK on both his home DVD 
>player and also on his iMac.   However,  when he attempts to 
>transfer the content to FCP4 , or iMovie 4 for editing/cleanup 
>purposes,  the video is OK , but there is no sound.
>
>We have tried passing the DVD's  content through DVD Backup and 
>DVD2one X,  but only end up with the same files as we started with 
>on the DVD.
>
>Is there any way of getting the DVD's audio into either FCP , or 
>iMovie, or does he have to fall back on the slow, laborious task of 
>passing his VHS content through his DVD camera ?.

DVD video uses MPEG compression. iMovie and FCP cannot read
this form and recover the sound directly. Also, you lose
lots of data in the MPEG compression process.

-- Erica