You have acquired a DVD cam, which records to a format that is not intended to be edited. Sort of like an instant gratification device, you shoot a movie this afternoon and play it back on the TV tonight.
You posted in the iMovie 4 forum, so if that is what you are working with, or anything up to iMovie HD6 for that matter, you can not capture from your cam directly into iMovie. All iMovie versions, except 08, only work with a miniDV cam with a Firewire cable.
There are workarounds to get the video off the cam onto your Mac, but they require third party software, at some cost, a lot of wasted time and any changing of formats usually results in some loss of video quality.
Your cam shoots in MPEG2. You need to have that converted to DV (Digital Video) for iMovie. Once converted, you can import the video into iMovie. You will need two things. Apple sells on this website a QuickTime MPEG2 plug -in for about $20.00 and you also need MPEGStreamclip (freeware - Google it). Those tools will convert your video to DV.
Message was edited by: Forest Mccready
