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Activity Forums Storage & Archiving MiniDV capture issues in 2023. :-) Help!

  • MiniDV capture issues in 2023. :-) Help!

    Posted by Daniel Scherl on March 9, 2023 at 7:30 am

    Hey everyone!

    I am posting this question here and on the fcp forum in the hope of getting a solid answer.

    I have about 100 MiniDV tapes shot on a DVX-100A at 24p. I’ve been trying to import them onto my Mac, however, it’s not working right. Here’s the specifics:

    1) All of the footage on the DVX-100A was shot in 24p. I don’t remember if it was recorded with pulldown inserted and the footage is actually at 29.97 or not.

    2) I plug the DVX-100A in the Mac a DV cable and adapters and FCP X sees the camera no problem.

    3) I click on Import – I try to create a camera archive OR just import the footage and there are two main problems.
    A) It’s only importing the footage at 29.97
    B) It’s making hundreds of individual files and even if were to drop them all onto a timeline and export them as one movie, there are frame drops / skips on every individual file, so they don’t line up. I imagine the frame rate discrepancy is causing this?

    4) FCP X has apparently gotten rid of the option to tell it what frame rate you’re ingesting and to tell it to ignore drop frames, so no luck there.

    I’ve tried importing the footage via Quicktime, via FCP X, nothing works. So…

    5) I then thought maybe I’d use FCP 7, and installed the OS in parallels, and when I went to install FCP 7, it says I don’t have the right hardware (Parallels is using the VRAM, etc.).

    6) Before I go down a whole road of wiping my older MacMini (which has a FireWire port on it) and installing Sierra on it, then installing FCP 7, hoping it works, and trying to digitize the footage there, I wanted to find out if there is another way to do this and one that is a lot easier?

    I know there HAS to be way to get this footage into my computer, but I am at a loss. If the best route is to use the older MacMini and import the footage through FCP 7, that’s fine, I just want to make sure that’s the best plan before I go to all that process.

    Would LOVE some help from you all. If I have to buy a piece of kit to do this, I can try that, I just want it to work.

    Thank you again!
    Daniel

    Doug Metz replied 1 year, 6 months ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
  • 1 Reply
  • Doug Metz

    May 17, 2023 at 9:47 pm

    Not sure if you’ve resolved this already, but you’ve got 100 tapes… seems like it would totally be worth the effort to set up the old Mini with FCS, with proper log & capture, cinema tools, etc.

    Hang some external storage on there, point your capture scratch folder at it, and let it cook.

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