Video Capture on the Mac
For reasons that matter not, I had to capture some Hi8 video this week using my Macbook Pro, rather than the PC that I have dedicated to such things. I hooked the Hi8 cam to my digital converter box (the excellent Datavideo DAC-100) and then firewire’d it to the Mac. The plan was to capture using iMovie and then create a DVD image in iDVD, neither of which I had used before.
When the DAC-100 can’t convert the analog signal (due to noise or whatever) it doesn’t send anything to the computer which is usually no big deal but iMovie absolutely did not like this: it seems that periods of silence on the wire are taken to mean the camera has disconnected. So it would keep stopping, and occasionally tell me that the camera wasn’t even connected any more. I tried different things for a couple of days and was about to give up when I discovered….. Vidi.
Not only is Vidi free, but it totally works like a capture program should. Silence on the wire? Ok, nothing gets put in the DV file. Need to chunk the output in 2Gb files? No problem! Some tapes that iMovie just wouldn’t capture for more than a few minutes were an absolute breeze using Vidi. I hit record on the Mac, play on the cam and 2 hrs later I had 26Gb of gorgeous converted video. I encourage you to check it out.