Suggested workflow for SD MPEG2 (mini DVD) to FCP timeline to MPEG2 (DVD)?
 

Hi all. I am working on something, for a client that has footage taken with one of those little Sony DVD Handycams. So it's a bunch of mini-DVDs wich I cannot mount on my PBG4 because of the nonstandard size.

For the first part of the job I just did the quick and dirty S-video transfer through my DV camera. Perhaps someone has been through this already and can suggest a better way. Perhaps there is a way to mount the camera's disks (using the camera as a DVD drive?) and some software to read the MPEG2 files... but then what sould I use and intermediate? Anything better than DV? Worth the hassle?

I just did a project consisting of footage from a Sony DVD Handycam. Because I have a G5 tower, I was able to mount the little disk, copy the .vob files to my hard drive, then use MPEG Streamclip to turn the (renamed) .mpg files into a DV-format .mov for use in FCP 4.5.

The format conversion worked rather well. The only buggy part of the workflow was that they had shot in 16x9, and I had trouble getting FCP to recognize them as anamorphic files. I'm sure that I still got it wrong, but I used the Motion Tab>Distort>Aspect Ratio set at -25. I seemed to loose some real-time functionality, but the clips looked fine.

I'd say if you can get any other computer, Mac or PC to copy the .vob files onto, then burn those files to a regular DVD-R, you can do the rest in your Powerbook.