Sony Mini-DVD Camcorder

Question

I recently bought a mac book pro and I have final cut express. I am trying to hook up my sony mini dvd camcorder to my computer so that I can capture my footage off of my camcorder to make movies. Any suggestion would be helpful. Thanks

Answer 1

"No matter how competent FC / FCE is, it is still a very small minority with respect to the numer of professionals actually using it. Adobe might be counting on gaining market share by being able to announce AVCHD support before Apple, and given that the majority of users out there do not use FC/FCE and that more an more Mac users are new users / switchers, it might not be such a bad plan if Apple is typical Apple and slow to adopt new technology (but getting it mostly right when they finally do move)."
I'm not quite sure what some of this means, and I think much of it is quite wrong. If, by the first sentence, you mean that only a small minority of professionals use Final Cut. This is quite inaccurate. It is by far the most widely used video editing software on the planet. Far exceeding Avid, Media 100, Premiere or any other available software. Avid is strongly entrenched in film production and primetime television, but that accounts for a minute proportion of all video production worldwide. I would also disagree that Apple is slow to support new technology. Apple was the first software with professional DV editing, native HDV editing, DVCPRO 50 and DVCPRO HD via FireWire, the first to support DVX 24p and 24pa, and while it might have have been the first to support IMX and XDCAM, it wasn't far behind. It was slow to support native JVC HDV 720p editing, but that's about the only area in which it was not a leader, and it only happened because Apple wanted to edit the material natively as it did Sony 1080i, coupled with the Intel issue. AVCHD is very new technology, and its use of delivery format, 15 frame GOP-based compression for acquisition presents huge issues for any editing applications. Not something that can be turned around in a couple of weeks or even months. One thing that has greatly slowed down the development of video editing application interface functionality over the last few years has been the constant stream of ever-changing formats introduced by camera manufacturers. This has meant that less and less time has been available to actually work on the software. In Apple's case this has been further complicated by the move to Intel-based hardware, and the necessity to port all its software to a new architecture. This has not slowed Apple's development and support for new formats, but it has greatly delayed feature enhancements, in my view. Personally I feel, at this stage, it would be better for the pro apps to work on core issues and enhancements rather than continue development for yet another format, particularly a problematic consumer format. Panasonic is developing a professional format AVCHD Intra that might be supported on the pro apps before the consumer version.