I found this a bit strange: > iMovie and Final Cut support capturing from MiniDV and write the data straight to disk without any modification, but they didn't

I found this a bit strange: > iMovie and Final Cut support capturing from MiniDV and write the data straight to disk without any modification, but they didn't work out for me for two reasons: > There was no way to turn down the audio while a tape was being imported When I did a similar exercise (on an older Mac that had a FireWire port), iMovie worked quite well. Since the import happens in real time (a 60-minute recording will take 60 minutes to import), the audio and video are played on the camcorder. All I had to do was reduce the volume on the camcorder to prevent it from being too loud. There was no audio output from iMovie on the Mac during the import. Tip: If you can get a Mac with iMovie '06 (as opposed to iMovie '08), use that. The older version of iMovie is better (not as much dumbed down) than the newer version.