Difficulty Exporting to Mini DV Tape

[Rigdon Currie]

As a recent subscriber, I am most impressed with the knowledge of you other
subscribers. I need your help.

I have successfully made several iMovies using a G4 with a second internal
40 GB "Video" hard drive, where I store my movies during editing. I recently
upgraded to OS X. 

While editing my most recent, longest (80 min.) and most ambitious project,
I have had an interruption and received this message on my screen:

"The Disk responded slowly. It may have been interrupted by something, or it
may not be fast enough for your movie. If you have a lot of audio clips, you
might try muting the audio track to see if this helps playback speed."

I carefully avoided having any other applications enabled. I also don't have
that many audio clips in addition to the video sound track. This really did
not cause much of a problem while editing. I just continued on.

However, the real problem is that I have been unable to export this video,
cut into two parts, each less than an hour, to Mini DV tape in my Canon GL
1. The export process just stopped and only once did I get a message and,
yes, it was the very same message quoted above. When I tried again, the
process stopped at another place in the movie. I could not figure out how to
restart at the spot of the interruption.

I don't believe I have slow disk. I have successfully exported many iMovies
from that disk. I first experienced the problem using OS 9.1 and hoped that
OS X would cure the problem but not so. I was also unable to export this
movie to Mini DV tape using my wife's more recent iMac. I was able to export
to her writable DVD drive, however.

Has anyone experienced this problem or have any ideas of how to fix it?
Could it be the length of this movie? Or have I somehow corrupted the iMovie
software?

I will be most grateful for any suggestions.

Thanks,

Rigdon Currie