DVD to iMovie

[Flicks]

I edited a bunch of home videos prior to any non-linear editing software and burned the VHS tape to a dvd. Now I want to take the dvd and go into iMovie and do some additional editing. The original VHS is in pretty bad shape and I'm not sure that it will play again. So...How do I transfer the dvd into iMovie? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[csi95]

Well, it may not be the best way to do it, but this will certainly work.

When I wanted to transfer some old VHS tapes to iMovie, I connected the RCA outputs from the VCR into my Sony DCR-TRV38 video camera. I then plugged from the video camera into my Mac mini using a firewire cable. In essence, I was using the camera as a middle-man to transfer the video from the VCR to the Mac. Works well.

You could certainly do the same with the DVD player. In fact, if your DVD player has an S-Video output (most do), and your camera does as well (mine does), you'll get even better video quality.

Just one option for you...

BTW, the same thing can be done with a number of dedicated converstion boxes in place of the video camera. Any Best Buy or CompUSA will have them. Pinnacle is one company that makes them.

Good luck!

[Natobasso]

Originally Posted by csi95

Well, it may not be the best way to do it, but this will certainly work.

When I wanted to transfer some old VHS tapes to iMovie, I connected the RCA outputs from the VCR into my Sony DCR-TRV38 video camera. I then plugged from the video camera into my Mac mini using a firewire cable. In essence, I was using the camera as a middle-man to transfer the video from the VCR to the Mac. Works well.

You could certainly do the same with the DVD player. In fact, if your DVD player has an S-Video output (most do), and your camera does as well (mine does), you'll get even better video quality.

Just one option for you...

BTW, the same thing can be done with a number of dedicated converstion boxes in place of the video camera. Any Best Buy or CompUSA will have them. Pinnacle is one company that makes them.

Good luck!

He said he already had the video to DVDs…

In that case you have to first use Quicktime Pro (just upgrade your current free Quicktime to Pro through the program's help menu) to import the video and cut and export out the scenes you want, then import those scenes into iMovie.

In Quicktime you select and cut by pulling the triangle sliders in the timeline, one on each side of the part you want to export, then hit "export".

This process can take a while and you'll need lots of memory so I suggest you have at least 180MB available for your work files. Once you compress, though, your final file should fit on one dvd, depending on how much content you put together.

Let us know how this works out for you.