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Golden Halo · Feb 26, 2006, 04:34 PM

Can someone help me out with this? Thanks

Baryon · Feb 26, 2006, 06:09 PM

What model is the handy cam? Is it a digital (miniDV or Digital 8) or analogue camera (Hi8 etc)?

Golden Halo · Feb 28, 2006, 11:59 AM

It is a digital and model DCR-RTV460. I never knew how to do this on my pc as well so i was always just recording video on the the memory card (very bad quality) and putting the footage on using the Sony picture package program it came with. Now I am having a hard time installing that program on my mac.... which I dont know but that is what could set up the mac recognizing the camera in the USB. Thanks

Baryon · Feb 28, 2006, 05:50 PM

The camera should have a DV in/out port (iLink, which is the same as Firewire, or IEEE1394). If you plug that into your computer, iMovie should recognise it straight away.

beeba123 · Mar 13, 2006, 04:10 PM

... and if you don't have firewire, both on the camera and on the imac, it won't work.

for digital video (other than the tiny postage-stamp sized videos), you need to use firewire.

grovberg · Mar 13, 2006, 09:41 PM

Most of the sony stuff doesn't work natively with a Mac. The easiest solution is a cheap MS reader.

k_munic · Mar 14, 2006, 04:39 AM

quote"Most of the sony stuff doesn't work natively with a Mac"

sorry to say that, grovberg, but that is nonsense...
Sony is, as Apple, member of the firewire standard consortium, ok, they call it iLink for some marketing reasons... all Sony camcorders come with fw ports (ok, maybe some historic D8 not), and sometimes they "forget" to package a fw cable...

they write in the specs for some additional software packages "windows only" because they want to sell their nice Vaios... but with a Mac you don't need drivers etc... BECAUSE of firewire, which is not only a plug, but a standarized protocol either...

@Golden Halo: get a 3$ fw 4-6pin fw cable, and you're done...

dlefebvre · Mar 14, 2006, 01:30 PM

Originally Posted by grovberg

Most of the sony stuff doesn't work natively with a Mac. The easiest solution is a cheap MS reader.

I successfully used many Sony Camcorders on my Mac (iMovie and FCP) ranging from a Digital 8 camera to the expensive PD-170. I never had any problem, even with my girlfriend's VX-1000 which is a prehistoric DV camera.

grovberg · Mar 14, 2006, 02:32 PM

k_munic and dlefebvre

Sure the firewire stuff works great if you're trying to pull video off of a DV (or digital 8) tape, but that's not what this post is about. Go back and read the third post and you'll see that the OP is not trying to get DV video off of a DV tape (sub in Digital 8 if that's what this particular camera is) onto his/her computer. They're trying to get an MPEG-1 file recorded directly to a memory stick transferred onto the computer. This can not be done over Firewire in any camera I've ever seen including the three Sony's here in the office.

So what we're really talking about here is a bare transfer of the .mpg file over to the computer. In any of the Sony cameras I've used (both still and video), the camera doesn't just mount the MS as a drive. Instead it uses proprietary software to transfer files from the memory card. Plugging it into your Mac usually results in absolutely nothing happening. Even the Mavica still cameras that burned CDs couldn't be used in Macs for quite some time.

That being said it's possible that something has changed recently (we stopped buying Sony cameras), but since the OP at least implies that he/she has already tried just plugging in the camera, it's safe to assume this is not the case here.

My advice remains the same. $20 Memory Stick reader.

beeba123 · Mar 14, 2006, 05:27 PM

actually, it sounds like the OP is unaware of the "right" method for getting real DV video off his camera, and has only been able to get the relatively crappy short mpegs via memory stick-- which i have been able to do, although since they're using multiplexed audio/video, i had to use a tool to separate, strip out and convert those to a format that was editable in iMovie.

it's like there's two cameras in one:

the still picture and crappy-movie camera writing to memory sticks and accessible via USB

and

the nice movie taking camera writing to mini DV tapes and accessible via firewire.

it's weird, they just don't seem to meet, but are packaged together...

--

oh, and both my sony video and still cameras mount memory sticks as hard drives when connected via USB.

Golden Halo · Mar 23, 2006, 12:20 AM

wow, thanks for everyones help!!!! i have quite a few things to try out.

Tuoder · Mar 23, 2006, 02:54 AM

If you have firewire, use it. If you don't have fw, I would guess that you only have USB 1.1, which would be completely useless for anything but postage stamp video, as has been mentioned before. The only Sony camcorders that will not work with a mac to my knowledge is MicroMV. That is a proprietary format that Sony uses to make rediculously small camcorders. Nowadays, there are MiniDV camcorders that are almost as small as MicroMV, so I would just skip that format (MicroMV) alltogether.