Extremely Important!!!!

Does anybody own a Panasonic VDR-M55 Video Camera? Its not DV. Its a DVD camcorder. It requires a DVD Ram driver. If anyone knows if this will work on a macbook pro. Please Please Please!!! Let me know! :bomb: Thank you.

First of all, using a descriptive thread title will get more people to help you.

Panasonic doesn't list a Mac driver on their website, but importing video from it shouldn't be a problem with iMovie. Just play the disc and let iMovie record the output.

as soon as I plug the usb 2.0 cord into my camera the play, forward, rewind etc. buttons are no longer funtionable. Its sort of like a normal DVD movie where you have the save it to the hard drive of your computer if you want to edit it. If I could connect through the A/V it might work but there are no such connections on the computer (not including the output). I have a special program that came with the camcorder that saves the video to the computer. As far as I know it is a windows only program. Its the only program (that i know of) that will save the video to the computer.

USB isn't supported.

Buying a universal AV switch, like this one, will allow you to use your camera's video out function to import the video.

Thats great, but it seems like it isn't compatible with panther, not to mention leopard. Unless of course the site hasnt been updated in awhile. Does anyone know if .vob is compatible with imovie and/or final cut. If I finalize the disc they turn into .vob files.

mcmillyonaire said:

Thats great, but it seems like it isn't compatible with panther, not to mention leopard. Unless of course the site hasnt been updated in awhile. Does anyone know if .vob is compatible with imovie and/or final cut. If I finalize the disc they turn into .vob files.

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You need a DVD ripper program that converts to DV.

HandBrake will convert to Mp4 and Quicktime Pro will convert from Mp4 to DV or possibly iMovie can read Mp4 directly.

Amen-Moses

By converting to mp4 and than DV wouldn't that kill the quality of my video? It puzzles me why panasonic would make something so limitiing.

mcmillyonaire said:

It puzzles me why panasonic would make something so limitiing.

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Maybe that just didn't think it was extremely important.

mcmillyonaire said:

By converting to mp4 and than DV wouldn't that kill the quality of my video? It puzzles me why panasonic would make something so limitiing.

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That depends on how it is encoded, if they have encoded at close to 100% quality (or maybe there is a setting on the camera that allows that?) then no, but if they have encoded for smaller filesize then yes you will be losing some quality.

Amen-Moses

Alll I Can Say Is Do Not Put A Mini Dvd Into Your Slot Loading Drive!!!!! There Is A Reason This Post Is In Caps Lock... You Will Not Be Able To Get It Out.

edit: they converted this to lower case letters?

i'll take your advice to not put a mini dvd into the drive.. hmm.. wonder if apple will supper mini dvds at some point?

mcmillyonaire said:

i'll take your advice to not put a mini dvd into the drive.. hmm.. wonder if apple will supper mini dvds at some point?

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At least not on a slot-loading drive, which is one of the reasons that Apple is able to make the Mac notebooks so thin. You can, however, pick up a cheap USB-external DVD drive.

BTW, regardless of whether it's a Mac or even your car's CD player, don't ever pop a mini-CD or DVD into a slot-loading drive. It's not easy to get back out and can damage the drive/player.

cwa107 said:

BTW, regardless of whether it's a Mac or even your car's CD player, don't ever pop a mini-CD or DVD into a slot-loading drive. It's not easy to get back out and can damage the drive/player.

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Not to mention the horrible rattling noise it makes.

Amen-Moses

ToddG said:

Maybe that just didn't think it was extremely important.

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awesome.