Import dvd converted from personal 8mm film
I sent in some old 8mm film to be converted to digital DVD. How do I now import from the new DVD to my iMac - what software do I use?
Can I edit the old films on my iMac?
iMac 21.5″, macOS 10.15
Question marked as
Hi, Duane,
If your Movies were digitized on a data DVD they will be uncompressed and displayed by file name just as if they were stored on a disk drive. With a data DVD, you would insert it into an optical drive that is plugged into your computer, click on the DVD to open it, and then you can simply Option-drag the listed movies to your desktop. If they are in a format that is incompatible with iMovie, you can convert them to Mp4/AAC with the free download, Handbrake. (More about Handbrake below.)
Alternatively, if your movies are digitized on an authored DVD, then they would be compressed and in MPEG-2 format. When you click on the DVD's icon on your desktop after inserting it into your optical drive, you will see a folder that contains a VIDEO_TS folder and an AUDIO_TS folder. Ignore the AUDIO_TS folder. Open the VIDEO_TS folder and you will see a list of files. Copy (copy, not move) to your desktop the files that have a VOB extension. Ignore the rest.
The VOB files contain your movie. Use the free download Handbrake to convert them to H.264, Mp4/AAC files that Handbrake will do by default. Then you can import the converted files into iMovie.
You can get Handbrake here:
A simple way to do it is to open Handbrake and do a File/Open Source. Navigate to your video and choose it as the source from the resulting screen. Then do File/Start Encoding. Wait a couple of minutes for the conversion to
complete. Then save and import the converted clip into iMovie.
If you simply want to convert the entire contents of an authored DVD to one movie in Mp4 format, you would open Handbrake and do a File/Open Source and navigate to the DVD's icon on your desktop. Then do File/Start Encoding. The contents of the DVD disk will be converted to an Mp4/AAC movie. You can then import the movie into iMovie and split it into segments if you wish.
All of the movies converted with Handbrake can be edited in iMovie.
-- Rich