miniDV transfer project – adapter party!
I've been posting about my saga of transferring all my old home movies from DVD, VHS, and miniDV to Plex. Here is my currently setup for miniDV capture on Mac.
Canon miniDV camcorder -> Firewire to Thunderbolt 2 adapter -> Thunderbolt 2 to Thunderbolt 3 adapter -> Mac mini
I initially tried plugging the Thunderbolt 3 end into my Caldigit TS4 (as shown in the photo), but that didn't work. Make sure you plug it directly into the Mac's Thunderbolt 3 port.
The main adapter you need to purchase now if you don't have one already is the Firewire to Thunderbolt 2 (looks like you might be able to still get from Apple store Hong Kong?) adapter from Apple. I had to order one from Japan on eBay for 3 times its normal price. They don't make them anymore so don't wait too long to get one.
No NLE supports DV anymore
It's amazing how fast formats can go from everywhere to nowhere. I could not find a reliable non-linear editor that would effectively capture DV footage over Firewire.
iMovie
iMovie would capture the footage but there was no sound. I couldn't figure out any way to get the sound to work.
Premiere
I didn't try Premiere myself but did some reading that indicated it no longer could capture DV footage because of operating system changes.
vrecord
This one works. I'm a software engineer by day so the terminal and command line is not foreign to me but I was still wondering if I could make it work.
Turns out it has a gui that pops up to get the settings just right. For capture DV video there really isn't much to set. Select your camera from the list, set the output file format (I prefer MKV) and filename, then hit record.
I was thoroughly impressed and thankful that there are people who recognize we need tools to deal with this "old" format. How many thousands of hours would be just lost because it was too hard to capture the memories?