# Help me out with basic DV editing on my Mac

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-out-with-basic-dv-editing-on-my-mac/404405>\
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion\
**Created:** [May 17, 2007, 3:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-out-with-basic-dv-editing-on-my-mac/404405 "2007-05-17T03:06:47Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![minor7flat5](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/minor7flat5/32/258_2.png) [@minor7flat5](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/minor7flat5)\
**Post date:** [May 17, 2007, 3:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/help-me-out-with-basic-dv-editing-on-my-mac/404405/1 "2007-05-17T03:06:47Z")

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First, the goal: I’m looking at doing some basic video editing of DV video to put together a short film of stuff from the USA to show friends and family in Brazil this summer.

In the PC world, I am familiar with Microsoft Movie Maker, and that tool suits my purpose fine. But I want to use my shiny new Mac instead!

I started up iMovie HD and plugged my camera in the FireWire jack and was quite pleased to see how easy it was to capture video. Excellent.  
As soon as I began working with it I found things getting kind of clumsy – the menus really don’t have very many options at all, and something as simple as selection a portion of a clip to cut was not as easy as I would like (no handy key to set cut-in/cut-out points at the current frame – I had to keep dragging those little triangles from the left side around.)

After a half hour of fiddling, doing some cuts and fades and other neat stuff, iMovie crashed. ☹

My question is this: What video software should I really be using? Remember my goal – a $1000+ professional video editing suite is not what I’m looking for. What do Mac folks do when they want to put together a simple video?

Should I just be more patient with iMovie and save my project more often?