My parents gave me a video camera for Christmas this past year in order to record the growings-up of the munchkin, now 13 months of age. It's a Panasonic VDR-D50P/PC DVD Palmcorder and unfortunately the software is completely incompatible with my glory of glories Mac OS X 4.11.
Damn.
I've had it for quite some time, allowing it to collect dust. That is, until today!
With some pain-in-the-assed techniques, you too can download your video directly off of the camera for your editing pleasure - without having to finalize your disk or use an analog bridge. This is how I did it.
Ready The Video
The DVD in the palmcorder is formatted to Video Recording (VR) Mode. Now, shoot your masterpiece - you know, the one where you're totally awesome stealing all that shit and beating up an old man. That'll never be found or used against you in a court of law.
Connect the Camera
Next, plug the camera into the USB port in your Mac and select PC CONNECT (DISC).
A DVD icon should appear on your desktop. Open it and go into the folder that you see. Inside there, you will find a .VRO file. Drag that file onto your desktop to copy it.
Make a Disk Image from the .VRO file
I then found this suggestion on macosxhints.com entitled How to rip .VRO files from DVD video recorders.
Basically, drag the .VRO file to the Video Tab of Roxio Toast Titanium. Once you see the video in the window, go to File → Save As Disk Image. You should now have a .TOAST file.(I used Toast, but I guess maybe other software that create disk images would work as well - don't quote me on that.)
Convert the Disk Image files into an .M4V file.
Now open Handbrake and click on the Source button. Open your .TOAST file click the Start button.
Once it's finished, you will have a nice little .m4v file ready for you to ravish into a new file format you can edit!
As I am no expert in any of these things, I will most likely not be able to help you troubleshoot, nor have I tested everything yet. If you wish, post your questions and I'll answer as best as I can.
So I am kind of in the same boat as you with the mac situation but I seem to have an issue with the disks. I have the same camera as you but when I insert my DVD-RW disc it tells me to format it, which then changes it to v, not vr mode. It doesn't allow me the option to format to vr. How do you get to that point?
ReplyDeleteThanks
Sorry, It's been a while since I've been able to get on, but I hope you're still listening...
ReplyDeleteAnyway, if you look at page 71 on the VDR D-50 online manual, that should help.
Otherwise, I can't help you out so much. My battery won't charge and the manual was, I presume, eaten by my son.