[Agent5556]

So I just got a new Sony Cybershot 5.0. Nice digital camera and works well with my mac. I just found out that you can take short movies with the thing too. I know very little about this type of stuff and add a mac into it and I know almost nothing. The problem I am having is that the videos are in MPEG.

My mac will play them just fine and they look really good. Only problem is I can't mess with them at all. I took about 9 small 20 sec clips of myself snowboarding. I want to make a small 2 min. music type video. I tried draging the the files into ivideo and idvd, but nothing. I think they will only mess with quicktime videos. I tried getting a progam to convert the mpegs to qt (DIVA) but the quality was bad. I hear quicktime pro will do it but 30 bucks for a 2 min video is pricey. For starters am I using the right program. Which program should I use to make this little music video idvd or imovie. I know macs are suppose to be movie machines how do i get this all to work? Thanks

[brianb]

Your biggest hurdle is that you are dealing with a wrong format. the files are probally either Mpg2 or mpg4. Both are bad for editing footage. As you found out, you need to convert to DV format. That part isn't to hard there are a number of ways to do the transcode. The reason the DV format looks so bad is that the camera is shooting the video at a very small resolution 16x120 or 320x240 something like that. So when you convert to DV you get an image that is blowen up to 720x480 ( the size of DV video), Just won't look good. Same basic principal as Digital zoom you are just making the pixels bigger