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General discussion

which mac for Transferring home movies to DVD

Dec 27, 2006 1:29PM PST

I have experience with Win and Linux but not with Mac. I am interested in purchasing a mac for the purpose of transferring my home movies to DVD. I have 8mm tapes, miniDV tapes and VHS tapes. The question(s) at hand are:

Which Mac to purchase? Can I use the mac mini? Or do I need something from the other end of the mac range?

What other hardware do I need? Video capture card?

What software should I use... does it come packaged with the mac?

Ed

Discussion is locked

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Any Mac will do this
Dec 27, 2006 8:59PM PST

All you need to edit your movies and to create DVD's of them is included with every new Mac sold. The software suite is known as iLife and includes, iTunes, iPhoto, iMovieHD ,iDVD and Garage Band.

Your only problem will be how you will capture the existing video. If you have a digital camcorder, it most likely has a Firewire connection (IEEE1394) or iLink (Sony name for Firewire) or a DV output. That takes care of the DV tapes. You could also use the camcorder as a pass through digital converter. Feed the output from the VCR to the camcorder and out to the Mac via the firewire connection.
If you have something that will play the 8mm tapes, you should be able to do the same with them.

The Mac Mini will do the job but remember, video takes a lot of hard drive space and 80GB may not be enough, although you could always get a large external drive to store your unprocessed video on. Also, the only Mac Mini that comes with a SuperDrive (8x double-layer SuperDrive (DVD+R DL/DVD

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Another hardware device
Jan 5, 2007 10:46AM PST

Mrmacfixit is correct: Any Mac will have the software you will need, but as he said, you will need to buy a model with a Superdrive to burn DVDs. No biggie. If you have tons of older 8mm stuff and VHS tapes to import, you might want to look at an analog-to-digital convertor box, like what Canopus makes. It has RCA composite video and S-Video inputs on one side, and it exports as DV (Firewire) directly into the Mac. The editing program in the Mac (iMovie) works perfectly with it. That's all you need. Once you use the Mac for movie editing you will be smiling.