JVC Everio GZ-MG77

Pros: Hard disk storage is the wave of the future

Cons: USB is unsat and MPEG-2 format is virtually useless

Summary: The JVC Everio is a great camera with two significant problems. First the data transfer system is USB. This is slow and not the standard for high speed video transfer. A top of the line camcorder should have firewire support, and there is no workaround for this. Second, the camera saves the data in a .MOD file which is an MPEG-2 codec. This is fine for direct transfer to DVD, but most editing software (like iMovie) does not support MPEG-2. Of course the sales girl at Best Buy didn't tell me any of this, and only after I filmed my son's birthday party and sat down at my Mac to post a little movie did the shortcomings of this camera begin to surface. So like all us geeks I stayed up all night looking for a way to prove I am actually smarter than the guys at JVC who know a lot about building cameras, but not so much about what it takes for the average consumer to turn boring home video into an interesting memory (I like to think of it as video scrapbooking).

About 4AM I arrived at the workaround described below and then tested it again after I woke up this morning to make sure it wasn't a caffeine dream. With this workflow you can successfully use the JVC Everio with iMovie.

BACKGROUND: JVC Everio camcorders use hard disk media to record video files which is great for navigating directly to the video you want to edit. The camera stores the video in a .MOD file in an MPEG-2 format. JVC provides software called Capty MPEG Edit EX for Evario, but it is not quality editing software and not worth the time to learn.

PROBLEM: iMovie can’t access the camera directly to import the video and Quicktime Pro doesn’t even understand the MPEG-2 format.

REQUIREMENTS:
a. dowload and install DropDV. This converts the .MOD MPEG-2 formatted video into standard Digital Video (DV) for iMovie. (see www.dropdv.com)
b. Optional - dowload and install Quicktime MPEG-2 player so you can preview clips before you burn disk space and time converting them to DV and importing to iMovie. (see www.apple.com/quicktime/mpeg2)

WORKFLOW SOLUTION:
a. Create a folder on the desktop and download the entire SD-VIDEO folder the camera hard disk to your new work folder
b. open the new folder in Finder and using the search function find all the .MOI files. Then highlight all the .MOI files and drag them to the trash. These are files that contain junk the camera faluted on and not real video data.
c. Next use Quicktime to preview the imported clips to verify which ones you want to convert. Delete any files that you don’t want in your movie. NOTE: You may need to change the name of the file from .MOD to .mpeg. Also, you won’t have audio because of a long technical discussion dealing with the codec for MPEG-2 and demux’ing it etc.
d. Now highlight all the files the folder, which after deleting the .MOI’s and reviewing in Quicktime will only contain the desired files for the movie. Drag all these files in one group onto the DropDV icon and it will convert to DV and create a folder on the desktop.
e. Open the desktop folder and click on the “imovie project” folder. This will launch iMovie and all your desired clips will be there including the audio you couldn’t hear in Quicktime.

Hope this saves someone the sleep I lost staying up all night to figure it out,
Zac