Hello,
I have been using the gz-mg130 for a few months now on my 1ghz G4 and let me tell you. It's a great cam, but it's not the most mac friendly device out there. The software that comes with it doesn't work on mac's I went to the website and they don't ever plan on comming out with anything that will work on a mac. So if your using a mac and still want this cam keep in mind that you will have to go through this process just to get to a point to where you can work with the footage that you have.
1. Once you plug it in and select connect to pc on the cam it will show up as another drive on your desk top.
2. From there you will need to select the file that you want to transfer and drag it over to where ever it is that you want to put it. For every file that you make the cam will give you three. The one the you want is the .mod file.
3. Ok it's now on your computer, you need to use a file converter because iMove won't do anything with .mod files (although I have heard that a new version may fix this)
I use mpeg streamclip from squared 5. From there you can convert it into a mpeg4 qt avi whatever floats your boat.
4. Once that is done you can put it in iMove and your off.
Doesn't sound that bad? well lets talk time.
Here are the average time for each steps
1. no time
2. usualy takes several minutes for every 5 or 6 megs of data (it took over 2 hours for 5 gig's once)
3. Take the time of the video and doubble it
4. For a 18 minute video it took over 45 minutes just to get it into iMovie.
So can you use it on a mac? yes, is it easy? yes, does it take a mind blowing amount of time to get to a point that you can edit it? YES.
I hope this helped you.
