I have a Mac...Now what do I do?

Red Wolf · Post by **Red Wolf** » Wed Jul 17, 2002 4:03 pm

As I've stated before, my guide is focusing on DVD ripping for importing footage. Two reasons:

1. You get better quality
2. I don't own a Hollywood-DV Bridge

I would actually love to get detailed information on how y'all import from VHS/DVD sources using the Hollywood-DV Bridge. I know how the item works (I sell it at work after all) but I've never had the chance to use it myself.

If anyone could give me a walkthrough of how you use the Hollywood-DV Bridge I would love to have it for my guide in addition to the DVD ripping info I'm putting on there. Screen shots would be even nicer since the guide will be covered in the things (I'll teach anyone who needs to know how to it how). Naturally full credit will be given to any walkthroughs I use.

GAlbright · Post by **GAlbright** » Wed Jul 17, 2002 7:50 pm

Wolf:

It's very easy. Ya just connect a FireWire cable out the back of the box to your Mac, and connect the DVD player or VCR to the front of the box with an S-Video cable or RCA cables (yellow-white-red). Launch iMovie, press Play on the DVD or VCR player, and click in the little camera icon on the control in the lower-left corner of iMovie. You'll see whatever video is going through the box appear in the viewing area. Fast-forward or rewind the disc or tape to a part you wanna capture, then press Play again and slap the Import button in iMovie. Click it again to stop capturing... and the scene appears in the tray. Repeat, repeat, repeat, then move the lower-left control back to the Flim icon and edit, edit, edit.

Other DV boxes will work the same way.

Really the hardest thing about it is remembering that the ports on the front of the box are for video in and the ports on the back are for video out. (They didn't label 'em for some reason...)

If you want to get really tricky, you can also hook up a video cable from the front of the box to a TV; the box will send video both digitally to your Mac and analogally (?) to your TV, so you can watch the footage that you're capturing on a TV instead of in iMovie's viewer. And, of course, you can also use the box to preview your AMV through the TV as you're working on it. Dazzle's decent manual will explain how to do most of this stuff.

GAlbright · Post by **GAlbright** » Wed Jul 17, 2002 7:58 pm

Three more quick things:

I finally got my QT 6 registration number. Yay! Test encodings, here I come...

What's up with this .Mac bull#&@*??? I thought I paid for using iTools when I bought my Mac...

...And if you're going to write this into your FAQ, note that folks should connect their VCR or DVD player to the DV box using an S-Video cable, if possible; I don't know the technical stuff, but it's supposed to carry a higher-quality video signal than using RCA cables. If they want to capture sound (since the S-Video cable carries only a video signal, not an audio one), they can still hook up the red and white audio parts of the RCA cables between the VCR/DVD and the DV box, so that the video is captured via the S-Video cable and the audio is captured via the RCA cables. (Just don't connect the yellow RCA cable.)

And if they're making an AMV, then it might be a good idea to delete any audio they capture via this method and don't want in the final product by Edit:Select All (or maybe just selecting the scenes they wanna delete the audio from), Advanced:Extract Audio, then just slap the Delete key. Audio go bye bye.

By the way, I might be using the term "RCA cable" incorrectly...

Red Wolf · Post by **Red Wolf** » Wed Jul 17, 2002 9:18 pm

Thanks, I'm pasting your notes now for future use. I figured it was easy but it is always nice to have a complete guide where ever possible.

I'm afraid iTools is merely going the way MANY other Internet services are going. Actually, iTools is one of the major hold outs until today. I understood the issue and my concern was what they were going to do with my account since I had paid for 100MB of storage space in addition to the original 20MB that came free. Luckily Apple emailed me and stated that not only were they going to honor my extra space (which I figured they would) but they gave me the first year of .Mac for free. So for the $100 I paid a month ago or so I now have a .Mac account with 200MB of disk space.

I guess I need to make some more AMVs to fill up that extra 100MB I just picked up

$100 a year is hefty for some in this community but that's what 100MB extra space sold for with iTools before (which is really needed to host your AMVs in MPEG-1 format) and this gives a lot more features. Apple treated me better than I expect so I'm happy until this time next year when I need to pay.

Rather disappointed in QT 6. Nothing to do with MPEG-2 as hoped and MPEG-4 isn't really impressing me but then again it is really for streaming video which is not something I do. The keynote, which was done in MPEG-4 today, looked horrible on the G4 iMac with QT 6 we watched it on at work until I turned the screen resolution down to 480x600 and made sure everything our 1.5MB/s DLS line could provide was going into that one streaming video. Let me know if you find anything interesting in your test encodings.

So how did this turn into a Mac forum all of the sudden? Oh ya, MacWorld was today

Back to AMVs real quick. I have finish my second AMV *crowd cheers* So, once I have everything encoded, on CD, and in the mail box (give me a day or so, one of those weeks) for the cons I'll be putting all my creative efforts back into the Mac guide.

GAlbright · Post by **GAlbright** » Wed Jul 17, 2002 10:27 pm

Actually, QuickTime 6 <i>can</i> import and play MPEG-2... <a href="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/products ... yback/">ya just gotta crack open your wallet and pull out another Jackson</a>. I haven't bought or tried it yet...

It won't encode MPEG-2, though... Still looking for a program that'll do that? Have ya heard about <a href="http://www.digigami.com/megapeg/">MegaPEG</a>? It seems to be a commercial product, but I don't see a price listed for it anywhere... maybe you have to download the demo thing first before it'll give you a number.

Red Wolf · Post by **Red Wolf** » Thu Jul 18, 2002 9:01 am

The MPEG-2 component looks interesting...up until I hit the system requirements. "500MHz PowerPC G4 or faster." Oh well, so much for MPEG-2 for me.

I've tried the MegaPEG demo. Easy to use but I wasn't overly impressed (are we seeing a pattern?). I certainly wasn't going to put down the $299 price on it without seeing a darn good improvment over my MPEG-1s.

GAlbright · Post by **GAlbright** » Thu Jul 18, 2002 5:28 pm

500MHz G4? What?! Wow, I didn't see that part...

Jeez, that doesn't make much sense. You don't need a Mac that muscular just to play a DVD... I wonder why the requirements for this are that much higher...

Red Wolf · Post by **Red Wolf** » Mon Jul 22, 2002 3:27 pm

Adobe announced Preimere 6.5 which will finally bring Premiere into OS X (the last big Adobe program to go to OS X I might add). The good news, Premiere 6.5 offers real time editing *cough*Final Cut Pro*cough*. The bad news, while the Windows version will include built in MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 compression, the Mac version will required DVD Studio Pro in order to do MPEG-2 encoding. You will be able to encode straight from the timeline *cough*Final Cut Pro*cough* but Adobe is not adding their own MPEG technology to the Mac version (insert colorful metaphor here). Maybe Adobe will decide Apple is a good DV editor and that they want to compete with Final Cut Pro by version 7.

To update from Adobe Premiere 6.0 to Adobe Premiere 6.5 is set to cost $150.