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senility?

Avatar Eric Jervis
Gentlemen, I fear I may be lapsing into senility, and only you can help me. I've got two camcorders, a Canon MV790 and a Canon MV800i, which are very similar. I use the 790 one, and yesterday, having bought a USB3 to miniDV cable from eBay, I imported some footage into iMovie HD on the iMac mid 2011 running OSX 10.8.5. Today I inserted another tape into the camera, imported a few minutes of video, stopped for a few minutes and resumed. Or rather, attempted to resume. This time it refused to work, saying 'no camera attached'. So I changed cameras but with the same result. Logically then, the cable I'd bought, which was made in China had given up; so I fired up the old Mini, also running on 10.8.5, connected with a Firewire cable, and had exactly the same result, 'no camera attached'.
I've missed out about an hour of messing about on the iMac, having had some reason to suspect that the tape had jammed, changed tapes to check, at which point I got the 'no camera attached' message so had to give up on that.
Phew, I've had a coffee and a smoke whilst reading the instruction book for the camera and discovered that both cameras play back the tapes perfectly on the built in LCD screens. I don't normally believe in coincidences, but it does seem that the DV ports on both cameras have failed, which is very annoying as that was my reason for dumping their predecessor. I must try to buy a similar camcorder, use it to extract my video, and then move on to some modern technology. Thank you for your patience Gentlemen, writing it all down has helped me to think it through. And of course, if any of you has an old mini DV tape camcorder to dispose of I am interested in purchasing it.

Re: senility?

Avatar Eric Jervis
On third thoughts, I've found a firm on line who will transfer the tape to mp4 on a memory stick which I can then import into iMovie for £5.50. Now to find a decent modern camcorder with a viewfinder!

Re: senility?

Avatar Mick Burrell
Me again!

It's too much of a coincidence for both cameras to fail on both USB and Firewire at the same time. From memory, iMovie HD was about v6 so is very old but should still run fine but you could try running Disk Utility to see if that can see the camera. I believe you should be able to see the camera without it playing any tapes

Re: senility?

Avatar Eric Jervis
Hi again Mick,that's what I thought, but of course the Firewire cable and the USB cable are using the same Mini DV port on the cameras. Have I overlooked something obvious?

Re: senility?

Avatar Mick Burrell
Disk Utility result?

Re: senility?

Avatar Eric Jervis
It is senility after all Mick, I couldn't believe that the same signal protocol would go via two different thingies, so I looked at the back of the iMac and found that what I thought was a USB3 port is in fact FireWire 800. Gulp, is there any hope for me?

Re: senility?

Avatar Mick Burrell
It seems unlikely Eric 😉
 
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