My daughter's teacher is asking me to capture a VHS tape so she can edit it and make a DVD. I have no clue about iMovie, and she has no clue about this whole thing...

Being a PC person, I can capture either into Premiere Pro or Edius. PremPro will give me a DV-AVI file in the dvsd codec, while Edius in the Canopus cdvc codec.

I am pretty sure the Canopus codec will not play on a Mac, how about the standard Windows DV-AVI codec dvsd?

Thanks,

I doubt iMovie will like either of those codecs. Can you capture using DVCPRO?

QuickTime DV-NTSC should be available as an option on the PC if you install the QT Player. Also you'll need to format a drive as NTFS for them to ready it. Honestly I'd just loan them a deck or a camera so they can capture for themselves in iMovie. The added hassle of capturing and converting from a PC is huge here.

Noah

iMovie have difficulties with .avi files. It can't open this format directly, but it can import .avi files. In the process however, which is painfully slow, a few megs turns into a gigantic file.

If you can't capture it as anything else, try running it through something like MPEG Streamclip into a .mov as a DV format

Good Luck
Ryan