IMovie 08, Sony HD camcorder and a Power PC G5

I'm considering buying an HD Sony camcorder. My husband insists on the HD. I've got a powerpc G5, 2.0 Ghz, 1Gb Ram, and iMovie 08. Which camcorder should we choose? I keep hearing negative things about the HDR-SR5 and models like it when trying to download and edit in iMovie 08. Should we pick another brand camcorder?

When you wrote "..I'm considering buying an HD Sony camcorder.." I'm not sure if you mean Hard Disc or High Definition.
The Sony HDR-SR5 is a hard disc camcorder. It records in AVCHD format, which can NOT be handled - as multithx mentioned, above - by a PowerPC Mac unless you download and install an extra program called "Voltaic" (..click on that blue link..) to 'unscramble' the AVCHD format video into a format which can be edited in iMovie.
So if you want to buy a Hard Disc camcorder, you need to make sure that it doesn't record in AVCHD format ..or you need to use that Voltaic program, which may be a bit cumbersome, and I don't think it performs well with rapidly-moving things, such as a train passing by, or cars whizzing past, etc.
If you want to use a High Definition camcorder, I'd suggest that you get one which records in 'HDV' format. Your G5 may just about be able to import hi-def HDV straight into iMovie in 'real time' ..otherwise there may be a bit of a lag during import, with imports taking perhaps twice as long as the actual video footage.
NOTE: Hard Disc is usually abbreviated to HDD (Hard Disc Drive), and High Definition is usually shown as HD.

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I am trying to use a sony HD Camcorder with a Power Mac G5. Will it work?

I just bought a Sony HD Camcorder and the info booklet says to contact the Apple People to see if this will work together? Thanks

Hi, I think it depends which version of Movie or FCP you're using...
iMovie ’08: Camcorder Support...
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1014
iMovie '09: Camcorder Support...
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3290
SD mode for G5s...
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1793

I have an older Sony digital camcorder, and I am having trouble importing the movie files. Sometimes I get the audio in iTunes without the picture. I have a Pinnacle Dazzle interface. What am I doing wrong. Is there a way to skip the dazzle device?

I have an older Sony digital camcorder, and I am having trouble importing the movie files. Sometimes I get the audio in iTunes without the picture. I have a Pinnacle Dazzle interface. What am I doing wrong. Is there a way to skip the dazzle device?

Chances are the pinnacle is producing .avi files or MPEFG1/2 streams - iTunes may know how to decode the audio but not the video. Download Handbrake and try running the Pinnacle files through it and adding to iTunes - use Universal format unless you have a specific device in mind.
Keep copies of the originals.
Another option might be to try to install Perian. Can't remember if the Apple MPEG2 plugin allows MPEG2 to be played in iTunes.
AC

I have a mac mini (without sd/sdhc card slot) and a sony cx160e camcorder and i want to import 50p video files, but i don't want to convert my video's. How can i import my video's?

i have a mac mini (without sd/sdhc card slot) and a sony cx160e camcorder and i want to import 50p video files, but i don't want to convert my video's. How can i import my video's?

Connect the camera to the computer with a USB cable and use the camera as the card reader. Make sure the camera is in playback mode.

I just purchased a Sony HD Camcorder need to down load the movie, How do i do this?

I just purchased a Sony HD Camcorder and can not find how to import the movies. Does any one know how to do this?

You will not be able to download the video directly to your iphone or iPad.
I suggest you download to your computer to edit.
If you meant to put this on the iMovie Mac forum, then you should re-post there.
I suggest you also state your camera model, computer model, and version of iMovie.

Sony camcorder and imovie 6

I have a movie on my camcorder and i can get it to download into imovie. it shows up in DVD player. support had me download Mactheripper, i guess it ripper the video and automaticlly puts it in imovie. i can't figure out macthe ripper. i need help!!!!!! pam

Oh, I see.
iMovie 6 can only import footage that is on miniDV tapes, not the disks or memory cards or hard drive camcorders.The video is probably MPEG 2 or 4, a compressed format that iMovie cannot read. If you want to use that type in iMovie, you need to convert it to DV format. Conversion may cause some loss of quality. You can use MPG Streamclip for the conversion. Whatever you do, do not put a mini disk into the disk drive of your Mac. It can get stuck and damage the drive, since the Mac is not designed to be used with these mini disks.
Here are some sites that address this.
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6799225&#6799225
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6236303&#6236303
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/video/mpegstreamclip.html
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/mpeg2/

I have iMovie 09 and have successfully used an older Sony Handycam to directly capture and record. Now I have a Sony HDR-PJ230 and it is not recognized. Do I need to upgrade to iMovie 11 or ???

Now I have a Sony HDR-PJ230 and it is not recognized in iMovie09. Do I need to upgrade to iMovie 11 or ???

Hi jcm2656,
iMovie ’09 does not support the Sony HDr-PJ230 camcorder. See this article for a list of cameras supported for that version of iMovie -
iMovie '09: Camcorder Support
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3290#1
iMovie ’11 however, does support it. See this article -
Apple - iLife '11 Help - iMovie ’11 Supported Cameras
http://help.apple.com/imovie/cameras/en/index.html
Note that iMovie does not support footage recorded in 1080-60p from this Camcorder.
Thanks for using Apple Support Communities.
Best,
Brett L

Choppy video in iMovie/iDVD from Sony HDD Camcorder

I feel like I must be doing something wrong here, I've just moved from a windows XP machine to a nive shiny iMac which is lovely and I just want to hug it a lot, but.....
My DVD's just aren't coming out right, here's me thinking Macs were renowned for their video editing, but all my stuff is looking better from windows.
To explain further, I connect my Sony DCR-SR32 to the mac via USB (the Sony is a hard disk camera which records to mpeg2) iMovie recognises the camcorder and allows me to import all my clips. I spend hours putting together some holiday footage with appropriate fades, titles and cuts. I then import the finished project into iDVD and spend more hours messing with the motion video menus and getting everything looking right.
I then burn to a DVD and it looks horrible, the frame rate looks like it's about 10 fps and it's jumping around all over. After some research, I find that Perion is probably to blame, and I can work around it by exporting from iMovie as a DV file or removing Perion which I've creating a DVD.
So the output is better, not so jerky, but something is not quite right, while it's not jerky its not quite as smooth as if should be, and the colours seem to be a little more pixelated a bit like when a divX movie struggles in an area of low contrast.
I'm comparing this to running XP in a parallels session, attaching the camcorder and hitting the "Disc burn" button which burns a lovely smooth and colourful DVD without a problem.
I thought this must be an issue with the conversion, convert to h.264 when the file is pulled off the camcorder, and then again into mpeg to burn must be missing something, but I took the raw mpeg files and got Toast to burn a DVD and that was the same "not quite right" result. I've read a lot about OSX's difficulties with mpeg2 and suggestions to use Streamclip with the MPEG quicktime plugin - will this do anything better, it just seems that with any conversion you're going to lose some quality, and converting several times to get something into iMovie then again when iDVD prepares the disk seems to be asking for more trouble ?
I've double checked all the obvious things, like is it set to PAL, and is the DVD burning at the best quality. I'm even burning to disk images to take the physical DVD out of the equation.
But still the results are not satisfactory. I really don't want to have to run windows still, iMovie and iDVD - although fairly basic were really nice to use, and the overall result is great... if I could just get it to look right.
Any idea on what might be wrong in all this, or how I can get a better quality movie to burn ?

Ok, this time I tested it in playback mode.
Connected USB. Chose HDD connect. NO NAME appeared on desktop. Opened iMovie (started my stopwatch at this point). Detected camera - scanning. Generating thumbnails (at this stage it is generating thumbnails for all the clips I have on my camera. For the record, I have 6 clips of 52secs, 22secs, 40secs, 27secs, 29secs and 1min). Finally, after around 1m50s, the 'Import From' window pops up showing me the thumbnails for each clip. I stop the stopwatch.
I only want to import the 1min clip this time, just for timing reference. To import this 1min clip on my imac (see my mac profile below) took 2m30s. This includes generating the thumbnails too, although I'm not quite sure why it does this again. I think 2m30s is very slow considering that DV would/should import in real time.
Anyway, those are my findings today and I for one now have a better understanding of how to connect my camera...playback mode only!
Thanks.
Lee

Trying to use Imovie to create a movie using a Mac OSX 10.6.7, 3.2 g Intel core. Using clips from my Sony CRX 150 and need to remove sound in order to add music to the movie. HEELLLP!

OK, I 'm attempting my first movie here using this Mac OSX Snow Leopard with IMovie. I have clips I created from an 8mm Movie projector copied on my Sony CRX 150 and the sound of the projector is all over these clips and I have no idea how to remove that before adding music. So far this has been great and this is my first bump in the road. Also I notice tho, that the icon for my camcorder has disappeared from the desktop and looks like I'm gonna have trouble "ejecting" it in order to shut things down!!! HELLLLP!

Thanks. I tested it out and you were correct. I loaded 2 .dv movies from my external HD back onto my internal HD, and got them re-imported into iMovie, took a few short clips from each of the 2 iMovie events and pasted them into a new project in the Project Browser. Then I deleted these 2 "source clips" from my internal HD, closed iMovie and then re-opened it and found that iMovie would NOT export the smaller clips for a "highlights" .4mv movie without the "source clips" being available.
I read your link on Quicktime. It talks about mostly trimming, which is what I did with each iMovie event before I took each one as a project to export as a smaller .4mv file. But if I use Quicktime (do I need QT Pro or basic), what advantage is it to me to use QT over iMovie (I must admit I am a novice at iMovie and have never used QT or QT Pro as a tool)? Will it then convert any edits I make to a .m4v movie or do I need iMovie to do that?
Does QT allow trimming multiple segments out of a movie during one edit session, or can you only do 1 at a time? By that I mean that, for example, when I use Sonys Picture Motion Browser for my .mts movies, you can only set one Start and one End point for each edit/trim you do: it does not allow you to set multiple Start Stop points like iMovie allows in its Event or Project browser. You can only do one "trim" at a time, save it and then reopen to do another trim. not very useful.

Confused about Sony HDR-SR7 and iMovie '08 import

I have my camera set to record at HD XP (15Mb/s). If I look on the camera hard drive at an arbitrary .mts file that is 107.3MB and import that into iMovie '08 at the Full (1920x1080) setting, that 107.3MB file turns into a whopping 854.5MB, while the Large (960x540) setting yields a much more reasonable 287.3MB file size (yet still double the size of the raw file sitting on the hard drive).
There's got to be some re-encoding going on, but what's the point? Why take a 100MB file and explode it to 800MB when you can't get any more quality out of the 100MB file?
Is it just the fact that iMovie doesn't actually support whatever native codec Sony's AVCHD uses, so it needs to re-encode it using AIC whose compression isn't as good as whatever codec AVCHD is using?
So this poses a real dilemma for me - do I import at Full or do I import at Large? Where does one notice the difference? If I blow up the 960 file to display the same size as the 1920 file, I can totally see artifacts on my 30" ACD, but would they show up on my Pioneer plasma TV? PDP-5070HD (1365x768))
Assuming I stay on Full quality - is there any way I can accurately tell how much hard drive space an import is going to consume? Right now my 60GB drive is rammed to the gills and I want to dump it all, but I need to make sure I have the space. 1:8?

Hi
*First: it sounds like you are not importing to iMovie, it sounds like you are trying to browse to the clips. That may not work.*
Ok - I was trying to import and also to view directly on the camcorder (but not at the same time). It was maybe 2 questions rolled into one so apologies if that was confusing...
*Second:You have SD and HD mixed, All of the SD has to be imported before any HD can be imported according to the manual.*
So what would I do, import SD movies first, and then delete it to then import HD specifically? Or do I just import SD and then import HD separately without deleting SD footage from the camcorder?
*Third point: The clips can be on the hard drive or the card. The camera has to be set to the media with the clips you want to import. If you recorded to the card, then switched to the hard drive, you won't be able to import the card video until you switch back.*
I dont have a card at the moment - only using the HDD.
*When you have the import working it is a matter of using the check box to select the clips you want.*
i assume iMovie loads them all up and asks you which ones you want to import?
*Alos one final point for video on the card I find it much easier to use a card reader to import. When I plug in the card reader to my usb port it mounts on the desk top, I start iMovie and the import screen comes up after iMovie is all opened up and running.*
I dont see much point in the card reader at the moment as the HDD is 120GB whereas I assume memory sticks only go to 8GB or so max...
*I hope I have been of some help.*
yes thanks for that - but am still confused by the whoel iMovie & HD import situation and how I should be doing it
All help appreciated

Speed mismatch between camcorder and iMovie?

Just imported a video tape (miniDV) for the first time, from my Sony HC3 camcorder into iMovie. All seemingly went fine and the 1-hour tape was divided into 165 clips.
A wacky effect I have noticed is that on the last 2 clips, my wife is suddenly speaking in a lower register - i.e. she has suddenly become an slightly slow-speaking alto, instead of a soprano. There is no lip-sync so I can’t really tell if the video element is also slower as it isn't critical but assume this is the case. Seems as if during the last 2 clips, the camcorder inexplicably speeded up, and/or iMovie went too slow.
Has anyone experienced the same? Any ideas why?
Mac Pro Mac OS X (10.4.9) 23" Apple Cinema Display

Sometimes simply closing iMvoie and then re-launching imovie fixes the problem.
It has to do with how imovie caches the information.
Try that first.
:)Sue

Sony Camcorder and an ibook G4 - a love/hate relationship?

Hi, I'm new to using a Mac and i'm keen to edit our summer videos, shot using a Sony Handycam DCR-HC18E.
I don't think it's compatible -so what do i have to do?
Is it worth keeping the Handycam or do i launch it up the Garden?
Hope you can help

As Karsten says (..at least, I think that's what he says!! nudge-nudge-wink-wink!..) that camera is completely compatible with iMovie.
Sony's description says (click on this link) "i.LINK (DV) In: NO, i.LINK (DV) Out: YES", which means, as Karsten said(?!) that you can feed DV OUT of the camcorder, but not back IN again from your Mac after editing, but that's no big problem: burn a DVD of it instead.
Sony don't pack a FireWire/i.Link/DV cable in the box (you can't use a USB cable for video) with the camcorder, but you can get the 4-pin-to-6-pin FireWire/i.Link cable which Karsten suggests at any Jessops/Curry's.digital/Dixons/PC World/Maplin/John Lewis or other electronics shop, and that will connect the cam to your Mac.
P.S: Karsten; it's a lovely day here in Haidhausen ..I'll be hobbling up to Herr Modl's camera and electronics shop in half a mo'..

Sony DVD camcorder series to miniDV camcorder to iMovie?

I have read many posts about the inability to import these into iMovie. I have a friend who bought one and wants to know if I can put his video on the web. Is it possible to run the AV outputs from his camcorder into the AV inouts of my miniDV camcorder, and then use the Firewire out to iMovie? i do this with old VHS tapes, and the miniDV camcorder acts as an A/D converter.
Thanks,
Ken

I have a Sony minidv camcorder DCR-TRV20, and although I have never done it, it has the ability to accept input from a Sony Hi-8 camcorder and pass it on to Imovie. If I recall corectly, this step is necessary to translate the Hi-8 analog signal to digital.
should that fail, you could purchase a Canopus ADVC-100 and use it to upload vcr videos,hi-8 videos, and minidv videos into Imovie. This is what is use and it works just fine. My unit cost me about $120 three years ago. I do not know whether or not there are new models.

Poor video from iMovie 11 imported from supported Sony HD camcorder

Poor video from iMovie 11 imported from supported Sony HD camcorder
Latest model New iMac 27 " screen 3.4 ghz intel core I7, 12 GB of memory running Mac OS X version 10.7.4
Imovie 11 version 9.0.7
New Sony hd camcorder model HDR560V, 64 gigs of internal flash memory, recording at highest quality hd settings.
Transfer is via USB.
Video in camcorder screen is perfect, same video connected directly from camera to a monitor is perfect. Also seems to be ok when importing into a Mac Book pro.
Import into the iMac using iMovie 11and played back full screen on the iMac has the look of soft VHS tape, not tack sharp and pronounced video lag when panning or when a subject moves across the screen. Has anyone else resolved a similar issue? Any suggestions would be appreciated. I paid for 3 years of Apple protection care but Genius bar experts at local Apple store are stumped.
thanks
tvideo

I'm sorry, I didn't know Imovie has it's own Forum- it's not listed here. Looks like I need an adapter for memory card, because I have an older Mac which doesn't have a slot for the card.

When connecting Sony HDD camcorder to IMAC, it launches Iphoto not Imovie

when I try to connect my camcorder to my IMac for the first time, it launches the iphoto software instead of imovie. How do I get it to launch imovie???
Thanks,
5Cubes

What Camorder do you have? I'm looking to get a Sony DCR-SR45 and I'm finding that it may not be compatible with a mac.

IMovie 08, Sony HD camcorder and a Power PC G5

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