streamclip

I'm getting ready for some vacation during next week; heading North towards Scandinavia. I've decided to take a camcorder in the back-pack and thought it would be interesting to experiment with a hard disk based system. So I'm using a very small Sony DCR-SR72E which is not supposed to be compatible with Apple computers. There were warnings all over the box.

Of course, I threw away the box at Heathrow airport to simplify carrying the bits and then did the same with the manual and the rather basic software provided when I got home. Instead I just plugged it into my iMac to see what would happen. "Hello", it said, "I'm a Sony camcorder". Then it showed me a directory structure and all of the little MPEG2 sections of test video I'd recorded. Yippee.

So I dragged them into iMovie just to see what would happen. Much faster to edit than tape, and more selective too.

They all played, but no sound. So I looked at the file type - MPEG2 (muxed), it said. Hmm.

So what can I use to unscramble the perfectly good sound from inside the files?

Streamclip.

I then dragged the files from the camcorder onto Streamclip. "what format would you like?", it asked, and gave me about 50 to choose from, including High Definition upscaling.

I settled for a simple, morose, broken down frankfurt.mov made from a few of the test clips and Yay, everything worked with conversion much faster than realtime playback.

You can enjoy me having a hotel breakdown in the video but, hey, I now have a perfectly fine hard disk based camcorder thats smaller than my SLR and works brilliantly with my Mac. Even if it says it won't on the box.

Expect Nordic video later!