[MacDV] Transfer of Home Burned DVD to iMovie or FCE

[Nick Scalise]

On Mar 5, 2006, at 5:42 PM, Juan M wrote:

> Perhaps this has been discussed many times

Indeed. Did you check the archives?

> I have a Pioneer DVD Recorder DMR ES10. If I burn VHS tapes (old  
> home movies) to a DVD. Can I then export those DVD movies for  
> further editing in iMovie and/or Final Cut Express.

You can edit them later, but by doing it that way, you introduce  
compression artifacts into already low res VHS tapes.

It is best to import directly into your editing app from VHS without  
the intermdiate compression of the DVD step.

That said, All you need to properly convert your DVD to DV are:

MacTheRipper
(gets the DVD to harddrive)

MPEG StreamClip
<http://www.alfanet.it/squared5/>
QuickTime Pro
QuickTime MPEG2 component
(converts the DVD to DV)

MPEG StreamCLip does an excellent job at this. You can point it to  
your VOB files and have it convert them all to dv. It will even cut  
the dv files to 1.9gb for iMovie, all you then need to do is get them  
into iMovie and you can edit at will.

Good luck,
--
Nick Scalise
nickscalise at cox.net