New Mac Pro Owner Looking for Help on (1 Viewer)

[Don]

Learning how to Convert VHS Tapes to DVD using the Mac. and usining IMovie and deciding what Software to buy for Video Editing and Making my Own Videos/DVDs i am a beginner.

 

[Brian L]

Both iMovie and iDVD have downloadable "getting started" manuals that you can get by selecting Help from within each application.

I recently got my feet wet with both programs, and while they are, IMHO, both very easy to use, it would be to hard figure things out w/o benefit of those manuals.

Brian

PS: I have no idea how to convert VHS footage to digital w/o an external box of some sort. I am not sure that the Mac has any sort of Video Input, but I could be 100% wrong about that.

 

[Don]

Brian i have a converter box but i'm not sure how to hook it up to my vcr or to the MAC. i also heard that i could use IMovie to help transfer and improve on the transfer process by making it look better.

 

[Ronald Epstein]

Don!

Welcome to the Mac club!

Hopefully this tutorial will assist you.

 

[Michael_K_Sr]

Don, I'm not sure what sort of digital AV bridge you have, but hopefully it has FireWire out on it. You can just plug it into the Mac, iMovie should see it and you can start importing video. You can then edit it and send it over to iDVD.

 

[Don]

the Bridge that i have is the ADVC-110 which i bought from the Apple Store. any ideas on the best way to hook it up. it came with no cables.

 

[Eric M Jones]

You need a firewire cable between the mac and bridge. Looks like it can be either a 4-to-6 pin or a 6-to-6 pin. Then you can connect the VCR to the bridge. S-video will be the best (if your player is so equipped) if not the other option is composite (yellow rca) Then you'll need to connect the audio from the VCR which is Stereo RCA (red & white).

Once you have it the bridge connected iMovie should recognize the bridge and you can "record" straight into it. It's gonna be realtime so how ever many hours of VHS you have, it will take that many hours to convert to DV. Also make sure you have a lot of storage space those native iMovie DV files take up a lot of space. Once you have things converted and edited you can export it straight to iDVD. You can get fancy and create menus and all or you can just burn a straight dump which is just the video. My advise is use Verbatim DVD's I've had the least amount of trouble with them. Test your discs on a stand alone player I've had a few that work fine on the Mac but wouldn't play in a stand alone.

-EJ