Video edits using Mac Mini

[Ninester]

Cleaning house, I found about 15 iMovie video CD's made on my B&W G3 back in the early 90's...last century.

I decided to break out one 20 year old Sony DCR-TRV103 and moldy old DV tapes to (try) to improve the compressed video that iMovie did.. price of CD's, burners, much less DVD disks were big bucks back when...

I was going to use the QT "full quality" instead of any compression direct to hard drive.  I have a bunch of BD25 disks to archive at later date.

A question for you movie mavens, I was just planning simple edits after pulling video off tapes. Anything better than imovie 2 for os 9 or boot back into Tiger to use iMovie HD? Seems that Apple really dumped on iMovie during that time so trying to sort out best for camera control via firewire.

All suggestions welcome!

[devils_advisor]

Data rate is too low for HD, technically it's a straight copy process of the DV tape. You can use final cut on 9 or X it's all the same you don't gain any quality.

[Ninester]

Thanks, I know the limits of the DV format.  I guess I was asking if one version of QT has cleaner output during this period.. but understand, garbage in...

One thing I noticed is iMovie always did a good job identifying the camera and tape transport, FCP saw a camera and ignored transport controls, I had to start import with menus.  Maybe bad install on my part.

Edit:  Just found a few post saying FCP likes a time code?  Not on my rusty oldest tapes...

[devils_advisor]

FCP uses timecode across the board, so does media 100 to synch to the signal and keep audio and video tied together. It can do without but since it is the Pro version its all more towards reliability. Imovie might let you get away with dropouts and wont say nothing. You would see that in form of out of synch issues. You could use a other stuff to create a synch signal for FCP but i have never checked out imovie.


Bottom line you should get away with it without time code. Just watch the drop outs if you disable Full stop on dropouts and it keeps just going.

[Ninester]

Thank You.

I used a cheap box to make clips of the recent Rock Hall of Fame from my cable box HDMI.  The output is 1080P around 16 Mb/s in MP4 format.  Makes my old Sony look like a bad cell phone but no time code in the files. Used iMovie HD for the short 10 minute clips.  No audio issues but would like the time code present for longer clips.  The old get what you pay for..

Cheers