Beta User Tip: Getting DV footage onto a current Mac
Here is a Beta of a User Tip for getting DV onto Macs, please add any comments or criticism.
Getting DV (Digital Video) onto current Macs
Around the turn of the century, there were many camcorders
that recorded into a format called Digital Video. (DV for short). This was one
of the first all-digital formats for home video recording and was an outgrowth
of the consumer analog video recording market.
Because USB was not suitable for streaming video at that
time, DV cameras had FireWire (Sony called it i.LINK) outputs. Since Apple
helped develop the technology (It also became an IEEE standard, IEEE 1394) ,
most Macs at the time had FireWire ports allowing for easy importing of DV.
iMovie came along to make non-linear editing available as part of the iLife
suite (First released in October 1999!).
Technology has changed much in the last 20 or so years, and
Firewire ports are no longer de rigueur on Macs (and never was on PC’s), so
importing tapes from old DV camcorders is getting more difficult, and you had
better hurry up and do it since the hardware is evaporating quickly.
First off, the easiest way is to simply punt and send your
tapes to a service like LegacyBox. For a fee, they will transfer your tape to
either a DVD (another vanishing standard!) or a file that you can download or
receive via USB stick. Check around, there might also be a local service that
can do this. When I transferred some 8mm movies to DV tapes in the early
2000’s, I found a local service in Hollywood that did a good job.
But if you really want total control, you need to get
Firewire to your Mac.
One option – which seems to be popular on the FinalCut Apple
Community – is to get an old Mac that has a native FireWire port.
If you don’t have an older Mac, you will need a FireWire
Adapter. There may be some non-Apple FireWire adapters out there – OWC made a Thunderbolt
dock with a FireWire port – but they are few. Do NOT get a USB to FireWire
adapter. Those might work for FireWire disk drives (I don’t really know), but
they almost certainly will not work to stream DV.
For the Apple solution, first you need a Mac with a
ThunderBolt 1 or 2 (the little square port) or a TB 3 port. It must be
Thunderbolt, NOT USB-C.
Now the hard part. You also need to get the Apple FireWire
to Thunderbolt 1/2 adapter [MD464ZM]. These appear to be discontinued, so they
are in short supply. If you have TB1/2 on your computer, you are good to go,
just plug the adapter into your Mac. If you have TB3, you will need Apple’s
TB1/2 to TB3 adapter [MMEL2AM]. (These, at least, seem to still be available.)
Once you have a FireWire port on your Mac, you need to
connect your camcorder. Most camcorders use the 4 pin FireWire connector, so
you will need a FW800 9 pin connector to FW400 4 pin connector cable. If you
have another FW 400 peripheral – such as a disk drive – you may be able to
daisy chain that to use the more common FireWire 400 connector to the 4 pin
connector.
Before you can import, you may need to activate legacy
device support if you are using Sonoma or later:
Now that the camcorder is connected, you can use iMovie or
FinalCut to import the DV footage. Note that Adobe has removed DV import
functionality from their products.
If you really can’t get direct import of DV to work – and as
you can see there are a lot of links in the chain between the camera and a
final movie on the Mac – there are other options. There are numerous hardware
options, such as El Gato, that can take the analog video output from your
camcorder and capture it into a file. However, quality may suffer compared to a
direct DV import. Use S-Video if available.
After it is imported and edited – at the very least you
should put a title at the beginning with some basic who, what & where
information (Your grandchildren will thank you) – you can save it as you see
fit. A good export format would be H.264 in mp4. Apple Photos or AppleTV app
are two choices for applications that can help you organize your movies.
TL;DR
If you want to import DV directly onto your current Mac, do
it sooner rather than later, since the hardware and software are getting thin
on the ground.
There are other options.
iMac 24″, macOS 14.2