Importing a DVD to iMovie

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Level 1

8 points

Importing a DVD to iMovie

I have made a DVD from clips copied from a VHS cassette on my Samsung DVD player. I then finalized the DVD.The DVD played the clips on my TV. After putting the DVD into my iMac I tried to import it into iMovie'08 with no success. I changed the name to an .mov and then to .m4v with still no luck. The clips play on the DVD on the computer but will not import to iMac. Can anybody help me out with this problem?

iMac, Mac OS X (10.4.10)

Posted on Feb 3, 2008 2:19 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Rich Rydalch

Level 2

315 points

Feb 3, 2008 5:35 PM in response to Songstan

I'm watching this one as I have had the same problem.
I have noticed that some DVD's will import while others will not.
I have had to resort to MPEG Streamclip to get those to usable format for editing.

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Answer 2

Jon Walker

Level 6

19,467 points

Feb 3, 2008 6:10 PM in response to Songstan

Can anybody help me out with this problem?

iMovie '08 will not import DVD content ("muxed" MPEG-2 VOB files) at the Finder level. Basically you have two options. The first is to create an "image" or copy the content to a medium which iMovie takes to be a camcorder device and import/converts the content as needed. (Search the topic for various strategies employed by some users.) The second method is to manually convert the non-zero VOB title sets to an iMovie '08 compatible compression format like DV and import at the Finder level as normal video files. (This work flow has also been described numerous times previously in this forum.)

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Answer 3

Feb 5, 2008 3:37 PM in response to Songstan

I had a similar situation and it was suggested I try HandBrake and it worked fine. I copied all my DVD files to an external drive, then using Handbrake I converted them to Quicktime. From there you can import into iMovie.

My only problem now is that my iMovie crashed last night and won't reopen. I have to try restarting and see if that fixes my problem.

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Answer 4

Feb 6, 2008 3:29 PM in response to Songstan

I have imported DVD's into the iMovie by first transfering the DVD into the computer using Disk Utilities. After creating a cdr file with disk utility I open iMovie and then double click on my cdr file. The iMovie should detect the files in the .cdr and ask you to import.

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