Sony’s Handycam DVD camera range [1] records directly onto 8cm DVDs.
A range of easy-to-use features makes shooting with the DCRDVD605 a pleasure. Recording direct to DVD makes sharing your memories so easy to share with family and friends. Choose from a wider range of DVD formats, including DVD+RW for immediate playback. [1]
The problem is that these units have also dropped the firewire/IEEE-1394/iLink connection for a custom USB2 connection … ouch! The units do not ‘plug in’ and appear as a DV device for video editing software such as iMovie, AVID or even Windows Movie Maker. So unless we do a conversion the MPG files are of no use on our editing Mac.
This means that we need to install custom drivers and software** so that the Handycam appears as a USB DVD (removable media) to the computer (tested on WinXP). In further tests we need to see if we can get the movies off with only the driver The movie files are extracted as MPG segments into a temp folder, and need to be copied from this area before closing the SONY package.
** package = SONY Picture Package v1.8 for DVD Handycam
The files are encoded with an Intervideo codec, which is no good in any of our prefered video editing packages. They can be opened by Windows Media Player, and even better in Windows Movie Maker.
If all of the segments (MPG files) are loaded into Windows Movie Maker Timeline, they can then be put onto a DV Camera via the Movie Task menu;
“Finish Movie > Send to DV Camera”
The DV Camera can then be hooked onto the Mac via the Firewire connection and we should be ready to go via iMovie or AVID.
This is the theory, we’ll see how it goes in the morning 🙂
Update 10-May-06 : this process works!
[1.] Sony’s Handycam DVD camera range [Sony AU]
