Comments on: iMovie ‘08: importing VOB, DVD or MPEG2 video without losing quality

By: Peter Lawrence

Peter Lawrence — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 04:28:49 +0000

I have tried to import into imovie from a disc image by mounting with discimagemounter as above. When I then open imovie I see a flash of “camera recognised…” then imovie quits rapidly. (Exactly the same as double clicking to mount).

Does anyone have a solution or do I have to convert to MPEG4?

By: johnfalla

johnfalla — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 23:40:24 +0000

DVD movies are encoded in MPEG-2 format, which is a completely different, more highly compressed format to DV tapes. So you can’t “retrieve” DV from DVD, you can only convert DVD to DV.

Bloody complicated, isn’t it?

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 15:49:05 +0000

how would you lose quality if you retrieve it as DV from DVD ?

By: johnfalla

johnfalla — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 23:25:12 +0000

Re that http://sfalken.blogspot.com/ link:

It works, sure, but you’re losing quality with each conversion. That’s not a huge issue if you’re starting with a high quality video but if it’s poor to start with..

By: Ben

Ben — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 01:39:32 +0000

awesome, thanks so much

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 17:38:51 +0000

look at http://sfalken.blogspot.com/ . It worked for me!

By: S.S

S.S — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 19:32:40 +0000

Hi, I just want to thank you for your information! This really helped me a lot!

By: phd

phd — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 17:01:32 +0000

First let me say that I am computer literate. So much so that these frequent posts for this problem of importing using an “image” has created a huge amount of frustration. If you are going to post this problem, please post a clear solution. Step by step. clear as crystal. Too many comments appear with the same problem.

So where is the problem?

The problem is that imovie ‘08 does not recognize the image! And crashes! So how do I import without crashing? Is there a size limit? How big is the file you are importing?

- Confused and frustrated.

By: JWD

JWD — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 01:48:09 +0000

VK–
iMovie 08 is weird in that you don’t always hear what you are importing through the computer speakers. I was downloading a VHS movie through a DV camcorder and had to use the camcorder’s speakers. I know, it is ridiculous. The sound is fine when you play it back, however.

ME-
It is there somewhere. Do a Spotlight search. Check iTunes folder, Movie folder. I have had the opposite problem-things get copied in too many places…

By: M.E.

M.E. — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 04:24:44 +0000

I created a movie through IMovie ‘08, published it, then burned it to a DVD using IDVD. However, now I can not find this movie on my hard drive to open it back up to re-edit the original movie. I assume that when I published it using the media browser that I finalized this movie. So…now I am trying to import the movie from my DVD back into IMovie using the instructions above. When I imaged the movie using the disk utility I imaged it to the desk top using the .dmg format. Next, I right clicked on the .dmg file and opened it with the Diskimagemounter as instructed. However, all it provides me is a window with audio and video files. Unlike the post above with the similar problem, I have IMovie ‘08 not IMovie HD. Any suggestions at this point would be greatly appreciated as I never anticipated when I first published this movie that I was losing the opportunity to go back in and keep editing.

Thank you for your help.