Sony DCR-DVD101, iMovie, I give up...

Got my new and first Mac yesterday and I'm starting to play with all the features. Today, hooked up my Sony DCR-DVD101 (no firewire, USB only) and tried to upload into iMovie. Basically, it thinks that the camera is a video device. Short of selling the camera on eBay and getting a new firewire camera, any thoughts to your Mac/Video experts out there? Pulling down all updates now to see if there is anything missing, but I don't think that is the issue, just old technology (gulp, only 2 or 3 years old now) I think.

Firewire is the only way to get the video into imovie short of putting the disc into a tray loading drive and ripping it using handbrake.

iMovie doesn't work with DVD Camcorders (Or DV camcorders with USB for that matter). Your only option is to import the DVD using a program like mactheripper and converting the Video_TS folder into a format that iMovie will use

That's what I thought. Was just looking through some firewire recorders now, price has come down some since I got this puppy. Looks like eBay will be on the scope this week and start looking for new camera.

Where is best place to check out mac ripper software? (what a mac newbie)

Thanks for comments.

I would use handbrake.. it removes a step and takes from the dvd to a editable format skipping the video_ts step

http://handbrake.m0k.org/

Yea you could do that. I haven't used them in a while but for some reason I just seem to remember in my tests that ripping the video_ts and having Handbrake not have to access the DVD from the drive was faster then going straight from the drive (although that could have just been because of the notebook dvd drives beings slower)

I have the dvd 405 and I am in the same boat as you. I had to use dvd shrink to decrypt the video then videora ipod convreter to transfer it to my ipod. This was on my pc. For the mac Handbrake will help. If you want to put it on the ipod use isquint.