In general, DVD camcorders are a mess. They're fussy, they take a long time to "initialize" and "finalize" a blank DVD, each disc doesn't hold very much footage, the recorded discs may not have a very long lifespan in your closet, and the miniature DVDs can actually damage your Mac.
If that's what you've got, though, the routine for importing video from a DVD camcorder—at this writing, the most popular format on the market—is exactly the same as it is for other tapeless camcorders. The instructions begin on Importing from Tapeless Camcorders.
There are, however, a few caveats:
iMovie can't import video from DVD camcorders that use the AVCHD video format (AVCHD, MPEG-2, and Other Such Jargon). Unfortunately, that pretty much rules out all the high-definition DVD camcorders.
Thanks to the hostility of the engineers who dreamed up the recordable DVD camcorder disc, most DVD camcorders offer multiple recording formats, with such cheerful names as DVD-Video and DVD-VR. Each has tradeoffs: One plays back in more DVD players, another lets you erase scenes before committing the DVD to plastic, and so on.
The thing is, you have to choose which format you want when you put the blank DVD into the camcorder. That's when the screen offers you the choice of formats. The key here is to choose the DVD-Video format, sometimes called Standard. If you choose VR or DVD-VR instead, iMovie won't be able to import your recorded video. (When you connect the camcorder, it thinks that you've just inserted a DVD, rather than thinking that you've attached a disk full of video.)
Get iMovie '09 & iDVD: The Missing Manual now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
