imovie import loses sound

[Dennis R. Cohen]

On 1/14/04 at 11:46 AM, Paul Williams <mulder at fred.net> transmitted the
following electronic
message:

>
>Well, i spent hours yesterday opening these mpegs in QT and exporting 
>in every format i could ... i mean, i literally went through every 
>one! No luck. I'm not sure how these mpegs were made, but it seems 
>any exporting drops out the sound.
>
>Oh well.
>

Don't try exporting MPEGs using QuickTime!

QuickTime doesn't demux the video/audio stream and only the video makes
it out.

If you're trying to get it to DV Stream with both video and audio
intact, the simplest method is probably to use Toast 6 Titanium. At the
bottom of the Video pane, you'll see an "Export" button. Click it,
select a destination and name, and then wait while the slow operation
proceeds. When you're done, you'll have a .DV file with both video and
audio. The only problem you might encounter is that if the DV file is
larger than 2GB, iMovie won't want to import it.

Another option is to use ffmpegX's Tools pane to demux the mpeg into an
m1v/mp2 pair (for MPEG-1) or m2v/mp2 pair (for MPEG-2). iTunes will
convert from mp2 to mp3, even though QuickTime Pro doesn't recognize
mp2. Once you have the m1v (or m2v) and an mp3, you can make a new
QuickTime file with them as the two tracks. Edit as necessary for length
and export to the format you want.

There are a lot of other solutions, but these are probably the two most
straightforward.

-- 
Dennis R. Cohen
Mac Digital Photography
iLife Bible