Students of mine used a digital camera (nikon coolpix) to shoot some video of a school event. The problem is I can't seem to edit them. The manual says they're saved as Quicktime in Photo JPG codec. Has anyone ever tried to import video from a digital still camera?

My son has a coolpix camera and uses a Mac and here is his answer to your question:

Import the photos into iPhoto using the USB connector. Then open iMovie ('06 or '08). Import the movies from your iPhoto library.

If you have PC computer we cannot help.

P.

A wild guess.

You might try importing the folder of image files, then shift-leftclick highlighting all the files and drag transferring the entire bunch to the timeline. Hopefully they will appear there as a bunch of one-frame clips in the correct sequential order. Only the most expanded vierw of the timeline will display them as individual clips. You may need to disable the thumbnail view as the computer will be taking forever to draw the thumbnail images. Then "export-to-movie" this out then import or "new sequence" the clip and edit that.

I did this to a bunch of jpg files converted from dpx files. The only hiccup was the very last frame was moved back to the first position in the sequential order.

I am not sure now whether I dragged the higlighted clips directly to the timeline or took them to the preview window first. My jpg files were conversions from a dpx motion folder so there may have been something there to tell the software that little fact.

There will be better brains than mine to advise you soon enough. In meantime there's something for you to try.

FOOTNOTE: I did this in Premiere Pro 2 with ProspectHD at filmscan setting and 25P which was the film camera speed (old CP16R news camera with 25FPS gearing for PAL.)

Try googling for "free mjpeg codec" and install it on your PC. AFAIK almost all still cams with movie mode must use this codec to enable editing.

thx for the replies, this is what I found out:
Pedanes Bol was right iMovie was the solution that worked!

On the PC Quicktime Pro can open and do simple edits such as a trim. You can also export as different formats. Although it doesn't seem to allow you to reimport audio. When I used Quicktime Pro I discovered that a couple of the movies had an "atom error" which is a glitch in the file that occurs when copying. Seems like movies recored to memory cards are prone to these types of errors.

Final Cut Pro didn't work because will not open it unless it's converted to dv.

So using iMovie on the Mac was the way to go.