One major advantage of using MovieShaker for importing from the camera is the ability to preview the clips stored on the tape. Click the Scan button under the Capture tab, and MovieShaker will shuttle rapidly through the tape, extract thumbnails for each clip, and display them in the Index tray in the Tool palette. You then can select individual clips and click Batch Capture to have MovieShaker capture them. Or click Dubbing to capture all the index clips from the tape.

You also can use MovieShaker to import and export video from and to the camera, and to convert to DV or another format to process the video using your other favorite tools. The MMV files created by MovieShaker are in MPEG-2 transport stream format, and therefore are not directly readable by many applications. I found that QuickTime Player 6 could import and play some MMV files reasonably well, although it could not handle others. Microsoft Media Player also could play the files, but only after they were renamed to MPG.

When you use MovieShaker to convert to DV format, it warns that the operation is going to take a long time. This is irritating in these days of real-time software DV to MPEG transcoding and DV-based previews, but not much slower than similar applications.