iMovie Camcorder Export Woes

[David Thrasher]

I just got my first big project on iMovie done (a talk show running 25 minutes) but I've been having problems exporting it back out to the camcorder.

Here's what I'm using:   A slot loading 800 MHz G3 iMac running Mac OS 9.2.2, a Canon Elura II MC Camcorder, and iMovie 2.1.1 (I believe). 

What's happening: When I export to the camera it will usually go smoothly until about 10 to 15 minutes in and then I'll start hearing the hard drive chug and I'll start getting garbled audio on the tape that gets progressively worse. It varies how far in it happens on each attempt.

I did manage to get it to export right just once. 

Here's what I've tried: 
Quitting iMovie and bringing it back up.
Restarting the computer.
Shutting down the computer completely to purge the memory.
Turning off virtual memory.
Increasing the disk cache some. (I haven't gone up too far yet with this.)
Optimizing the hard drive.

The time it worked the best was when I had optimized the hard drive, shut it down completely first, and had virtual memory on.

I'm not sure if the problems I'm having exporting are due to settings or if I have an undiagnosed hard drive problem. I certainly don't want to undergo these sort of hassles everytime I export something larger than 7 minutes to Mini-DV tape.

(PS: I may post some notes about this production here - about problems I encountered and work-arounds I came up with, in case any of this information is useful to someone.)

-Dave


David Thrasher
5631 Ovid Avenue
Des Moines, Iowa 50310

e-mail: idave at earthlink.net
eBay name: daveindezmenez