Issues importing mini dv tapes into imovie

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Level 1

41 points

Issues importing mini dv tapes into imovie

I am the owner of a new 27" 5k iMac, spec is 2TB HD Fusion and 8 gig RAM.

I have lots of old mini DV tapes which I have been keen to import, it hastaken a while to figure out how as I didn't have the correct cables. I now have the Apple Firewire to Thunderbolt adapter, and then purchased the correct Firewire cable to go from the camcorder to the adapter.

Last night I attempted to import through iMovie, it all seemed to be workingand the preview was being displayed on the screen. However after a while there
is a strange constant flicker only showing on the Mac, the camcorder is playing perfectly and not displaying this flicker - I can only describe it as if one frame is constantly flashing up squished in a diagonal line, as if one frame has somehow got stuck but the movie is still recording/playing back. It looks like it records OK but it's so painful to see for the length of the tape I had to switch it off.

I don't see this on the Windows laptop, but two out of the three test imports I did threw up an error saying that it couldn't create separate clips and so was one large single clip - as I'm typing this I'm wondering if it is something to do with a dropped frame getting stuck, which is what I'm seeing?

I know nothing of importing video at a technical level, but am keen to save what I already have - do the tapes degrade over time?

Luckily I do have lots of them from my Windows PC I imported years ago, but kind of wanted to start afresh.

Is there anything (free) other than iMovie I could use?

Many thanks in advance - my heart sunk when I saw this happening as I thought I had it sussed!

iMac with Retina 5K display, OS X El Capitan (10.11.1)

Posted on Nov 19, 2015 3:37 AM

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Answer 1

Etuj Author

Level 1

41 points

Nov 24, 2015 7:05 AM in response to Etuj

I thought I would just update this with my findings so far, and that I am still yet to find an answer to this rather strange problem.

I have imported 10 mini DV tapes so far successfully, all appear to be of reasonable quality and with no errors or issues, other than with the screen flicker I still seem to randomly get. I thought it was happening when you use the camera controls rather than rewind from the screen, no it wasn't this. I also thought it might be applications running in the background, again not this. I can see no errors being reported in the log either.

Strangely I can have almost an entire tape in the preview window on the Mac flickering up the same image for the duration of the import, and it is just one single image from a point on the tape, but after import I can find that image and there are no problems as it has been imported without fault.

As an aside, I am noticing a very subtle difference in quality compared to the same video when imported into Windows as AVI, the quality on the Mac isn't as good - is there a way I can increase the quality of the import on the Mac?

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