We've aquired a workable mac mini box last week, ported ZS4  to it using XCode and voila, we had our free video compositing software running on OS X (Tiger). This article explains how to go about capturing and importing video into ZS4 on os x computers.

We used iMovie to capture video from our Mini DV Camera to the hard disk drive. We then used the t@b video converter / encoder to convert the catured footage from *.dv format into a motion jpeg format which ZS4 can understand. One of the benefits of this conversion is the fact that without any quality loss our footage ended up using only about 30% (one third!) of the hard drive space which was used in dv format. The result of this conversion were *.avi files encoded with a mjpg codec.

When exporting a video composition from zs4, export as an i420/iyuv avi. This format can be read by quicktime. Any avi file exported with the I420/IYUV codec can thus be loaded back into iMovie or other Mac software for encoding.