[isis]

Hi
I have a 17" powerbook, and a friend wants me to edit some tapes in final cut. The problem is that the tapes were recorded on a sony micro format tapes which is not in a format suitable for editing on amc. So whats the best work around for getting the footage into a stream suitable for editing. the solutions I was thinking were
1 to copy the footage to VHS and borrow friends formac studio to convert to digital stream
2 Can I copy from the sony camera direct into another camera
3 If i get the footage copied to a dvd is it possible to then extract a dv stream from the VTS_folder
4 could i get the footage converted on a pc and if so how?
ok any suggestions appreciated
Thanks
steve

[nate_02]

You should be able to just plug the camera directly into the computer through firewire and use it that way. If Final Cut doesn't support that camera (which it should), your best bet would be to record it to another camera through firewire. I would avoid DVDs or VHS.

[grovberg]

Originally posted by nate_02:
You should be able to just plug the camera directly into the computer through firewire and use it that way. If Final Cut doesn't support that camera (which it should), your best bet would be to record it to another camera through firewire. I would avoid DVDs or VHS.

I don't think Final Cut would support this camera. Even though it has Firewire, MicroMV uses MPEG-2 to record the video, which as the original poster mentioned, is not a great format for editing and not one that Final Cut would recognize over firewire (could be wrong about that, but MPEG-2 is not listed on the supported formats section of the specs page for FCP http://www.apple.com/finalcutpro/specs.html ).

Option 3 would probably give you the best quality since it's all digital (I'm assuming that option uses some PC only software that came with the camera). Or if you can borrow the formac studio, just plug the analog outs from the camera directly into that and digitize that way. Some theoretical quality loss there (compressed digital to analog back to compressed digital), but probably not terribly noticeable. I doubt option 2 is possible since most firewire just spits the DV data directly off of the tape and hooking the MicroDV camera up to a MiniDV camera would have to involve some conversion somewhere (nothing I can find indicates that the MicroMV camera would do this).

If the software that came with the camera allows you to just get an MPEG-2 file from the tape, you could save yourself a DVD-R and just get that and then convert that to DV as well. All kinds of resources for that can be found at http://www.videohelp.com/

Hope that helps some.
-Grover

[isis]

Thanks so much for the advise, tonight I will be trying to getting the formac and hopefully will get some result from this. Thanks for the advise so far
steve