HD movies and the Mac

> From: Paul Atroshenko
>
> My old reliable Sony mini-DV video camera uses mini tapes and I was
> wondering what the latest news was on tapeless movie recording. I take it
> that the 30 GB harddrives in the latest Sony HD consumer cameras only accept
> compressed images which are difficult if not impossible to edit properly on
> either iMovie or Final Cut Pro. Is that right, or am I behind the times?
>
> Is there some relatively easy way to edit the compressed video using today's
> software?
>
> Finally, is there anything on the horizon from any of the camera makers
> which will record (perhaps wirelessly) to large, protable harddrives, so
> that full blown HD material can then be transferred to the Mac? Is that too
> much to hope for?

Hi Paul,

I personally just bought a Panasonic HVX200 and plan on hooking it up to a
Firestore FS 100. I plan on using a GearDear box strapped
on to a waist belt and hooked up to the Firestore with a right-angle FW
cable which makes it all much more secure.

From what I have heard the transfer times between the hard drive and the CPU
are a bit slow, but that will hopefully improve with new Firestore software.

Also, the 16Gb P2 cards are imminent and improve P2 recording-time
considerably.

Forums:

http://forums.creativecow.net/index.html

http://www.proapps-hub.com/

http://digitalproductionbuzz.com/

http://www.eventdv.net/

Cheers

D A V I D E M E R I C K

On Feb 15, 2007, at 12:46 PM, Paul Atroshenko wrote:

> Is there some relatively easy way to edit the compressed video
> using today's
> software?

Well, depending on the variety of formats you need available, import
and export, Apple sells the mpeg plug-in for QTPro, which I've used,
but my bread and butter tool has been the freely available and
powerful MPEG Streamclip <http://www.squared5.com/>. It's very
powerful, and very fast. There are commercial tools that do similar
things, but I really like the speed of MPEG Streamclip on multi-
processor systems. It has more settings than you might understand,
but the documentation is thorough and there are forums available from
Then I also use TOAST Titanium set to NEVER ENCODE in the custom
settings so that I can edit out pieces of a DVD, and simply reburn
the edited VOB files without re-encoding and losing quality. Works
quite well for me.

Jeffrey

I know Sony recently came out with this hard drive recorder for HDV cams--the HVR-DR60

http://bssc.sel.sony.com/BroadcastandBusiness/DisplayModel?id=85967

But this is a professional type of device and priced accordingly.

For myself, tape is cheap. HDV cams are now within reach of most enthusiasts, and the support to edit HDV is already available.

For a good website to research DV check out, http://www.dvinfo.net