I have a Sony DCR-HC52 miniDV camera that I’ve made a few tapes with over the years, mostly just family parties and the like–things that at the time you mostly don’t care to rewatch, but suddenly after 10+ years the memories become more precious.

Ever since recording video on your phone has become higher quality, and easier to do for long periods, the standard def DV camera has fallen into disuse, but the other day I came across it and decided I’d break it out to convert those old tapes to a more portable digital format while I still had the working equipment and before the tapes got too old.

These DV cameras came with an interface that let you move the data off tape digitally and on to a computer, in theory there is no quality loss like you had when you converted from analog tape/signal to digital.  Apple calls the interface “Firewire” and Sony called it “i.Link”.  There are other vendor specific names, but the technical (and common) name is “1394”, named for the number assigned to the specification by the IEEE (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_1394)

My first hurdle, my circa-2014 Macbook Pro doesn’t have Firewire, but it does have Thunderbolt.  After confirming online that this is the way to go I bought a Thunderbolt to Firewire 800 adapter and then a Firewire 800 to Firewire 400 (4-pin) cable.  Plugging the entire thing in I saw the “DVin” icon flash on my camera for a moment, but otherwise no connection… Further poking around online came up with nothing much except a surprisingly short list of supported DV cameras for iMovie from Apple.

I never did a get a definitive “it won’t work” from my searching, but based on the fact that it doesn’t work it appears that modern iMovie has dropped support for older DV cameras.

One other alternate suggestion online was to break out an older Firewire equipped Mac from an era where these cameras were modern and might still be supported by the older copy of iMovie–I do still have my 15 year old G4 PB, but I decided to go another route and look at Linux options instead.

Within a minute off googling I had the answer–there is an open source program called “dvgrab” that will connect to, control, and pull over the video data from DV devices.  A quick question/answer here provided everything I needed:

http://askubuntu.com/questions/1694/is-it-possible-to-import-dv-video-using-firewire

Fortunately I have an old Lenovo T410 laptop which is running Ubuntu 16.04 and happened to have a 4-pin 1394 (firewire) connector on it, I also had a 4-pin to 4-pin firewire cable laying around (see, this is why I never throw old cables away…)

Installing dvgrab was as easy as running sudo apt-get install dvgrab and then the command to start creating files from tapes was equally easy (because some wonderful askubuntu user put it together 5-7 years ago for me!)–

sudo dvgrab -a -format raw -rewind -t prefix-

The above command will start dvgrab with a few useful options–

-a will try to break the video files up by scene (if you had started/stopped your recordings)

-format raw will save the file as .dv which is the native format … this format is easily playable by VLC and can be imported directly into iMovie

-rewind commands the device to rewind first–convenient if you’re cycling through tapes, you pop it in and run the command it will detail with rewinding and then starting playback as well as stopping when the tape is done

-t will add a timestamp to the file name

prefix- will append whatever you replace that word ‘prefix’ with, for example ’70th_birthday-‘ will append that text to each file created

By default dvgrab will break the video up into 1GB files for easier handling and importing (or smaller if -a finds scene splits)

Make sure that you have plenty of space available as it’s about 1GB per 5 minutes.  I have a 250GB SSD in my Lenovo so capture is easy, and then I moved them to a 1TB USB drive for safe keeping.

I was able to copy the files from my Linux machine over to my Mac using ‘scp’ from the Mac command line and then import them into iMovie for editing, titling and saving into a more compressible format (each 1GB .dv file wound up being about 200MB once in .mp4 format).

Now the files can be put up on Dropbox, burned to DVDs, or otherwise spread out to keep the content safe and accessible for more years.