I've been using Vegas both at work and at home the last five years. But yesterday I bought an iMac, and wanted to see if I could import all my old private videos to the mac.
That was not as easy as I imagined :-(
In vegas I have always made a HDV and Cineform-AVI of every clip for future purposes, but mac can read neither of them.
But I guess i will have to fiddle around with the Quicktime-export in Vegas.
Maybe the best solution is to export a clip from iMovie, open it in Vegas and study the properties of the iMac-generated clip?
In vegas I have always made a HDV and Cineform-AVI of every clip for future purposes, but mac can read neither of them.
Sure it can. I trust you have these on an external hard drive, so use MPEG Streamclip (free) to convert the files to Mac format QTs. For Cineform, you should ask them for the best way, probably trivial.
Note that all Macs can read NTFS ("Windows") hard drives, but can't write to them without a utility (some free, some inexpensive).
Quicktime isn't supported on the iPhone or iPad.
Huh?
What did you think they used when they were playing back video?
They both even have hardware support for H.264 playback, and a robust CPU for playing back other formats.
What do you think the button marked "Podcasts" is for?
When I have a moment while travelling, I watch video podcasts by top post production folks during breaks, and I often listen to podcasts while driving.
It's quite convenient to subscribe to what you want and get it automatically downloaded to your iPhone or iPad, including over free Wi-Fi at every Starbucks in the country (afaik, it's free for iPhone/iPad only).
I am rendering Quicktime from HDV in Vegas for a Mac-based stock footage house. My footage is interlaced and after a lot of trial and error I am using Motion JPEG B at 90% quality. If your footage is progressive you could use Photo JPEG or perhaps JPEG2000. I've found that 75% quality looks pretty good too, especially if you don't intend to do further editing.
One big danger with the conversion is a shift in gamma so look out for that (i.e. big shifts in luminosity/contrast). Some combinations of format and rendering software will give you this gamma shift, but writing from Vegas seems to avoid it.
There is a version of Cineform Neoplayer for the Mac. It's free and it might enable your Mac to read your Cineform AVI files.