[Topaz]

My son has an old Sony video cam (2003) that uses 8mm mini cassettes. He has several cassettes that he has asked me to convert to DVD for him. At this stage I don't know much about the camera or indeed how to convert same to DVD. I am anticipating that the camera does not have Firewire but some other means of connection as he used to view his videos from his camera linked to a TV.

Does anyone know how to do this and what app I shall need to hopefully accomplish this. A few tips please.

p.s. just realised I have Roxio Toast Titanium - will this app do it?

[ibook_steve]

If the camera does have Firewire, iMovie all the way. If not, you'll need some hardware that can bring analog video into the computer. Check out the USB products from Elgato. They're pretty good at this.

Steve

[red rocket]

It might be a lot less hassle to just send the tapes to one of those firms that specialise in converting to DVD. Just looked on eBay, one place charges £5 per tape +£3.99 postage. There are loads of those firms around.

[Topaz]

Well I got there in the end. I have a HDD/DVD recorder that I managed to connect the camera to it and copy the contents to the hard drive then burn it to a DVD. I connected the video/audio connectors from the camera to a "Euro Connector" which enabled me to connect to the av2 scart connection on the DVD recorder. This then enabled me to copy the hard drive and then burn or "dubbing" as it's referred to.

At this stage however I still have no idea how I would be able to connect the camera to my Mac other than purchasing a USB to RCA Composite Cable Assembly and hope that did it.

I now have my DVD's as I wanted but in a somewhat raw state and so now I would like to give them some polish like editing to remove unwanted scenes and introduce titles and credits etc and reburn. I could have included a menu on my DVD recorder but wanted something a little more interesting and imaginative. Any tips please on what to use. Will iDVD do this or is it a bit basic?


Answer:

On the DVD now is a MPEG2 version of the video, highly compressed and unsuitable for editing. However, taking it off the DVD ( suggest using MPEG Streamclip - free and excellent), you can now use it in iDVD.

The best way of getting analog video into the Mac is with a converter analog to firewire. This gets the video into iMovie, where you can edit it. They are not really expensive. Here is the method I am using to extract video from a DVD. I used MPEG Streamclip to convert the files. There are now a few other tools available for converting the files to something iMovie can edit but Streamclip is free. I used the DVD burner from my TiVo for this project but it should work with any unencrypted DVD. Trouble is, converting from MPEG-2 to DV and then reconverting to MPEG-2 doesn't help the quality at all. It is much better to forget the DVD intermediate. The A/D converters (Analog to DV - Firewire) are not that expensive.

If you can find a camera with a pass through connection that would cut out the conversion. The only problem is that it occurs in real time.
Bliss!