Getting my video on to a computer.

After facing challenge after challenge with getting my video filmed I was incredibly happy to finally have it sorted, but then i had another bump in the road when trying to download my footage from the SD card to a computer or a mac. Firstly i tried putting my footage straight onto the mac, it put my SD card into the SD card slot in the mac, I then tried a similar method using an SD card reader which i plugged into the USB port on the mac, failing this i tried the same on pc. After these had failed I tried to put my footage on to the pc via the camera itself this did not work however when i tried to do this with the mac, miraculously it worked, this however was very time consuming and frustrating.