iMovie Export Woes - update

[David Thrasher]

I just wanted to update everyone on what had happened on the problem I was having exporting from iMovie 2. 

If you recall, I had told about getting choppy audio on longer projects and hearing the hard drive chug. It would typically happen about 7 minutes into the show.

I looked in the discussion groups in the Support section on Apple's website and found out that this was a problem with iMovie 2. Two solutions mentioned were using iMovie 1 to do the exporting or using some shareware software called "BtvPro" to do the job.

I simply can't find iMovie 1 anywhere (Apple took it off their website long ago) so I couldn't try that. There was a potential problem mentioned with it where it might not understand some projects from the newer version if it contained features not in iMovie 1. They mentioned that workarounds were possible. I'd assume that they wound tell about exporting a full quality Quicktime file and then using Quicktime Pro to export it into a DV file so that it could be reimported into iMovie 1.

I downloaded BtvPro. It had a 30 day trial period so I used it to see if it would work without the problems of iMovie 2. It worked flawlessly so I decided to pay the $40 shareware fee. My theory of why iMovie 2 was having difficulty exporting was that it was trying to do the video in 2 places: rendering on the screen in iMovie itself and pushing video out to the camcorder. Because my little 800 MHz iMac couldn't keep up with pushing video in two places at once, something had to suffer in the digital video transfer and that was audio. BtvPro on the other hand wasn't rendering anything on the iMac screen so all resources were devoted to outputting to the camcorder. I didn't hear any signs of abnormal drive activity while it was outputting. Not that I'm trying to push this program but if you want to take a look at it, you can find it at http://btvpro.com

Thanks for all the suggestions. I'll try to post some production notes about my little show when I get a chance.

-Dave