canon hv30

With a pile of old MiniDV tapes, I wanted to extract the video to my Mac using a Canon Vixia HV30 camcorder. Connected via FireWire, the camera showed up in iMovie 11 but refused to import any of the video. The video would playback on the camcorder screen, but iMovie only showed a blue screen during import.

I found one suggestion to change the output of the HV30 since the recorded format was older, non-HDV video. While the camcorder is disconnected, you can change the camcorder’s output, and the recommendation was “DV lock.” Sadly, that didn’t fix the problem.

Then I came across this post with a fix of deleting iMovie’s preference file. The article says to delete:

username/library/preferences/com.apple.imovie8.plist

But I couldn’t find that exact file. I did, however, find com.apple.iMovieApp.plist and com.apple.iMovieApp.plist.lockfile in ~/Library/Preferences. I dragged both out of the folder to my desktop and launched iMovie which generated a new preference file.

Can you believe this worked? The import video in iMovie 11 now behaves as expected. I can control the camcorder over FireWire and during import, I can see the playback on the camcorder screen and in iMovie. Who knew that one corrupt preference file could cause that much trouble?!