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1. Importing Video > Importing Footage from Old Analog Tapes
Importing Footage from Old Analog Tapes
We live in a transitional period. Millions of the world’s existing camcorders and VCRs require VHS, VHS-C, or 8mm cassettes—that is, analog tapes instead of digital.
These days, people buy only digital camcorders. But in the meantime, how are you supposed to import and edit the footage you shot before the digital era? Fortunately, this is fairly easy to do if you have the right equipment. You can take any of these four approaches, listed roughly in order of preference.
Note
When you use any of the approaches below, iMovie won’t be able to chop the video into individual scenes automatically, as it does with digital video. That’s because old analog camcorders didn’t stamp every frame of every shot with an invisible time code, so iMovie doesn’t know when you started and stopped your camcorder.
