IMovie 08 importing, help please? (URGENT)?

Question

I'm trying to import some video clips from my sony camcorder to iMovie 08 (using a USB cable). There's supposed to be a window that pops up automatically so that you can import everything, but it's not showing up. It doesn't seem to be detecting my camera... The window used to pop up unexpectedly sometimes but lately it hasn't.

I've supposed to edit this movie right now but there's nothing I can do...?

Answer 1

You cannot import video from a miniDV tape or Digital8 tape based camcorder using USB. You need to get a 4-pin to 6-pin firewire cable. Firewire, i.Link and IEEE1494a are all the same thing. Your Mac has a firewire400 port already so you do not need to add one.

When your computer and camcorder are connected, iMovie will have a blue window that says the camcorder is connected - the camcorder needs to be in "Play/Edit" mode.

If you are using a hard drive or flash memory based camcorder, you will use USB to copy the files to the Mac - but not import directly to iMovie - you need to convert them first using http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/vi...

Download and install it. Convert the highly compressed MPEG2 video to .mov - then drag that to the iMovie clips pane or the timeline.

Post again if you are using another kind of storage media - more details about what camcorder and which Mac would be really helpful, too.