Using Sharp Camcorder as Analog Digital Converter - howto avoid iMovie cmds

Question

Using Sharp Camcorder as Analog Digital Converter - howto avoid iMovie cmds

My wonderful sharp camcorder can act as an analog-digital converter right out of the box i.e. plug your old VHS into the camcorder on the one side, plug the firewire from the camera to your Apple on the other side.

Perfect.

If ONLY iMovie would not start sending PLAY commands when starting "Import". Sending the play commands starts the (empty) cassette in the DV camera! If I remove the DV casette iMovie complains about "no cassette".

But the Sharp is getting the signal from an external VHS and converting it right out to Firewire DV. Perfect. If only iMovie would NOT send weird commands but just record whatever comes in via Firewire.

Heck. It can't be that hard. I don't want to record bits of analog material on DV cassettes (which the camera can ofcourse also do) and then replay those cassettes into the Mac.

Anyone got any experience how to tell iMovie stop acting stupid? Even a Unix command like cat </dev/fw >mymovie.dv would help if that does work.

Thanks a lot.

PB 12" G4 867MHz, Mac OS X (10.4.4)

Posted on Jul 6, 2007 10:52 AM

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Answer 1

Jul 6, 2007 3:43 PM in response to Joachim Schneider

Is there a mode you can set in the camera?

My Sony works fine, but I have to take the tape out.

I set the camera to "Analog in ->DV out"

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Answer 2

Jul 7, 2007 12:59 AM in response to Keith Barkley

That's what I do. I set the camera to Analog->DV "ON" according to the manual and it works as described.

Problem: If I remove the DV cassette iMoive complains about "No cassette" and won't start the import although the DV-signal is already there.

If I then put in a cassette iMovie keeps sending the "PLAY" command with every push on the IMPORT button --> starts the cassette to Play.

The camera can be used as some kind of "black box analog digital converter" but it still reacts on commands send via Firewire.

If there would be a way to have iMovie NOT send any PLAY/ PAUSE whatever commands or just ignore that there is "no cassette".

What I'm missing is something like a "Get whatever comes via Firewire. Me, User, knows better than you do"-Mode.

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Answer 3

Jul 7, 2007 1:12 AM in response to Joachim Schneider

Earlier versions of iMovie did NOT send the 'Play' command. The 'Import' button simply started video capture.

You can still download iMovie 3.0.3 - though it lacks many of the present iMovie features - from Apple's page here.

To avoid any kind of software conflicts, put iMovie 3.0.3 in your 'Movies' folder, instead of in your 'Applications' folder. Then it should work OK even though you have a later version on your Mac, too.

[..Although you can update iM 3.0.3 movie projects to work properly with later versions, just by opening them, you may have trouble opening a current iMovie project in an older version of the program!..]

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Answer 4

Jul 7, 2007 1:11 AM in response to Joachim Schneider

Have you tried having the tape "compartment" both opened and closed?

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Answer 5

Jul 7, 2007 10:59 AM in response to David Babsky

This one looks perfectly ok especially as I still have a PowerPC mac it should work fine.

Thanks for the link, I can't test it now as my VHS broke down 😟 but will do so next week.

I rate this one as helpful as actually: iMovie not sending the Play command will solve the problem.

Thanks a lot and have a nice weekend!

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Answer 6

Jul 7, 2007 11:03 AM in response to Lennart Thelander

What I did now is, I put the Camcorder to record on a DV cassette. The sharp in this case does the analog-digital conversion and records right on a DV cassette.

Now the plus: During the record the Camcorder puts the DV signal on Firewire still but does NOT react on any commands sent via Firewire, well, he's recording on his own cassette and doesn't like interruption 🙂

With this setup I can push IMPORT in iMovie and it will record PLUS sending the PLAY command will not have any effect.

Minus: When the DV cassette ends, the recording stops. So you're limited to somewhat 60-90 mins of DV cassette length, but that works for the moment (not for 4 hours of material at once but ok).

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