Newbie seeks advice on importing to iMovie from JVC Everio

Hi there,
While I'm an old hand at the Mac - I really have little experience of AV applications and cams. I am very interested in buying a JVC Everio GZ-MC 500 or MC 200 Digital Media Camera, but just found out that I cannot import movie outputs into iMovie. Since MicroDrive technology seems like the way of the future I'd like to stick to the JVC. Is there any work around to this problem?
I have iLife 05 with iMovie HD installed and have just downloaded QT7 with Pro upgrade on the way. Does the MPEG 2 component solve this situation?
Any assistance to this would be a great help.
Thanks and regards,
Des

My experience with microdrives (..incidentally, Clive Sinclair used the name 'Microdrive' for the tape storage devices he sold for his original 1980s home computers ..about 20 feet of videotape wound into an endless loop in a teeny plastic housing, rather like a miniature 8-track cartridge ..they were also used in the ancient British ICL 'One-Per-Desk' under licence from Sinclair: those two slots along the top are microdrive slots.. Oops ..sorry; where was I..?) ..is that they're unreliable. CF cards are better. But how much video can you store on a CF card, and at what price?
Microdrives need a moment to run up to speed, and constantly starting and stopping them - as I've done with, for instance, a Sony F828 stills camera - I find that the drive gets confused about whether it should be saving or accessing ..and just stops working. Same thing has happened to me with a microdrive in various other devices. So I don't trust them any more. I've used various sizes (340Mb, 1Gb, 2.2Gb) and I always cross my fingers: some have stopped working completely; others have had to be reformatted as DOS, and then formatted as Mac HFS+ ..and I've found them to be more trouble than they promise to be worth. Imagine suddenly losing all your video after you'd just shot about 46 minutes' worth.. Weddings? Argghh! The bride and groom would be so disappointed ..and so would you!
There are various programs which will read MPEG-2 footage (..including the audio: iMovie will play the video 'natively', but often without the sound..) such as Streamclip. That'll convert MPEG footage into proper QuickTime, which iMovie can handle. So you could connect your microdrive(s) to your Mac, copy the footage, squirt it through Streamclip, then edit it.
However, be aware that the quality of the footage may not be as high as material recorded with proper miniDV (or Digital-8) tapes because of the nature of the Everio's recording/compressing/storing routine. The specification - on that page mentioned by 'L', above - shows that the Everios record in the same format as DV "NTSC (720x480) 4:2:0 PAL (720x576) 4:2:0" but - not having tried one - I dunno if the final appearance ..once the video's been 'unscrambled' from MPEG-2 format into something iMovie compatible, then saved back to tape or hard disc.. is as good as DV. It might be even better [..HDV hi-def is saved as MPEG-2..] but I couldn't say.
But DO be careful about microdrives ..ask a few Everio owners before putting down your money and buying one. And how does the price of a microdrive compare with a 60 minute miniDV tape?
Oh, by the way, I almost forgot: welcome to iMovie Discussions!

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Message was edited by: OttawaDave

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Newbie seeks advice on importing to iMovie from JVC Everio

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