11-18-2005, 11:00 PM

A buddy of mine video taped our school's talent show tonight and let me take his DV cam home to transfer it onto my iMac. I was hoping I could finally try out some of iMovie! BUT, the only cable he had was a Mini-DV to Mini-DV, because his computer has a Mini-DV port. From what I can tell, my iMac does not. So, I was wondering what different routes I can go to get this stuff onto my computer.

1. Is there some sort of mini-dv to firewire/usb port available for a reasonable price?
2. It has a little USB thing so maybe I can use that (although I think that might be for the photo capabilities of the camcorder).
3. If my friend does it on his computer and burns into onto some CD-Rs, can I transfer those into iMovie and finally take a stab at editing some video and make a DVD?

Thanks for any responses.

-Taylor

11-19-2005, 07:33 AM

1. Not sure if there's an adapter, but you can get a cable with a mini-DV connector on one side and a 6-pin Firewire connector on the other. mini-DV is nothing else than a 4-pin Firewire connector. There is no converter from FW to USB.

2. You're probably right.

3. Depends on which format he will use. As long as he uses an industry standard, and not the Windows standards (WMV), that should work.

But I would recommend you to get just the cable I described above, and do it all on the Mac...it'll make importing and therefore postprocessing much easier. And it's cheap as well.