Creating that home DVD...

Spring cleaning time over here...

...I have about 30 Hours of DV (Digital Video) to 'store' and convert to DVD.

Tiger comes with iMovie HD, and iDVD., (all part of iLife 05). I have a copy of Final Cut Express somewhere, but not sure if it's OS X or Classic !

So anyway...first off I am hooking up my (old) Canon DM-MVX2i camcorder to the PowerBook via firewire. I have also wiped a 160Gb external hard drive...DV files get very big !

Now for the long bit, I prefer to 'capture' the DV tape natively from the camcorder...so in iMovie I just create a new project and then tell iMovie to import !

Just a quick tip...whenever doing 'Video Capture' always reboot your Mac first and then only open iMovie (or your capture program of choice !), then once you've hit the import button don't use your Mac for anything else ! I know it can let you surf or check your email, whilst it's capturing,but to get the best frame rate possible just let it do it's thing !! (currently writing this on an iBook while PowerBook is capturing !)

I am not capturing the data to the internal hard drive...PowerBook hard drives are relatively slow, so when I first told iMovie to create a new movie...I told it to save it on my external Firewire drive ! (my internal drive spins at 5400rpm and external at 7200rpm). If you have a choice then use your fastest and largest drive.

iMovie is now importing the first tape, it's intelligent, so every time it see's a stop/start on the tape it creates a new 'clip', effectively these will all be individual files, so it makes editing and adding transistions easier ! Have a look at the pics below and you can see what I mean !

more to follow !

Sorry got a bit side tracked, I tried to convert a DV tape direct from the Camcorder to iDVD using the 'Magic' feature...5 hours later a DVD popped out !

Quite nifty really...

Anyway back to iMovie, once you have imported all the clips you can then start dropping them into the timeline...

Back again, the iDVD interlude 'stole' 18Gb of my hard disk...I noticed that a large chunk of my internal drive had gone missing...iDVD had created a lot of large temporary files but had not removed them !

Simplest way of checking is to do a "Command + I" on every 'top' level folder on your hard drive, these should add up to the size of your hard drive, (give or take ).

Mine was 18.7GB different, reboot hold down "Command + S" and follow the instructions to do FSCK...this will correct most problems and get rid of those dodgy temporary files.

Once it's completed with no errors, reboot again back into the GUI. Low and behold my 'lost 18Gb' had returned !