Sony Handycam to iMovie

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pencilpaper

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I just bought a Sony Handycam DCR-SR42. It does not have a mini DVD or Firewire, rather it has its own hard drive and connects via USB.
My Mac, a desktop from 2006, running OS X 10.4.10, has iMovie HD.

I have been trying tirelessly to import footage according to instructions from iMovie help and from the Sony Handycam handbook, but I keep getting a message that says: "iMovie could not import the file because it is not a movie file. Quicktime could not parse the file."
The files are .MPG format.

Does anyone know what to do?

I've already tried to format the camera's hard drive (both on the camera and on the computer), but that didn't work...
 
.MPG is the file's extension, not its format. It could be MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, theoretically. This matters. From what I read, it should be some sort of MPEG-2. Your best bet would be to use iSquint (free) or VisualHub (good) to convert the movies to MPEG-4/H.264 which you can import to iMovie. There's also an MPEG-2 codec (decode-only AFAIK) for Quicktime Pro, but I can't be sure it'd work fine with this camera's files.
 
Just in case you are still suffering, I found one workaround that, while time-consuming, at least gave me access to my videos. I have a Sony DCR-SR42 Handycam and a Powerbook G4 running OS X Tiger 10.4.1.

(1) First I installed Virtual PC on my Mac, with which I then installed the software that Sony shipped with the camera. It properly detected the camera and downloaded a 2 hour video in about 10 minutes over USB... but for some reason it would not let me watch the video.

(2) I copied the video to my Mac OSX

(3) I was able to view it by going through two other quick steps. First, I downloaded and installed http://www.squared5.com's MPEG Streamclip (a free download) to convert the file to a standard Quicktime format.

(4) The last step was to buy the "QuickTime MPEG-2 Playback Component" at the apple store, so that Quicktime could read MPEG-2. The link for that update is www.apple.com/quicktime/mpeg2 and the MPEG Streamclip gave me the like upon install.

After days of frustration, the elapsed time for the above was about 15 minutes, and now that it is done, the only manual steps are to plug in the camera, copy the resulting file to my Mac OSX, and open them in Quicktime.

I don't yet have iMovie '08 to see if the resulting footage is editable, but at least I can burn DVD's and watch them, which meets most of my needs.

Hope that helps!
 
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