I can't answer your media conversion questions, but I believe the video quality would be best-preserved if you convert your camera's recording to a DV stream for importing into iMovie HD. I believe converting to MPEG4 will produce yet another level of compression. But it might not be enough to notice.
<br><br>The iMovie HD pasting feature you are describing is called "Paste Over at Playhead". In iMovie HD v6.0.3, it is under the Advanced menu. In iMovie HD's Help (which was not replaced when I installed iMovie 8), it is described under "Cutting, copying, and pasting clips". If you want the audio from the pasted clip to NOT replace the original audio, you need to go to Preferences->General and make sure that the "Extract audio when using Paste Over at Playhead" option IS selected. When that option is selected, the original audio plays under the pasted clip (usually what you want).
<br><br>-Gordon<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Dec 21, 2007 11:21 AM, Robert Green <<a href="mailto:greenrw@shaw.ca">greenrw@shaw.ca</a>> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
I recently installed ilife 08 so I could import mpeg2 from my new<br>hitachi dz hs500a camcorder. It turns out that it doesn't recognize<br>the codec that this camera uses. When imovie 08 is installed imovie<br>hd remains so that you can choose which version to use. As I
<br>understand it imovie hd has better editing features. My intent was to<br>import with imovie 08 and edit with hd. This doesn't work but I can<br>get the files off the camera with the imagemixer software supplied<br>
with the camera and then convert them to mpeg4 with isquint to get<br>them into imovie hd. First question is, is there a better way to do<br>this? Next is, in a previous project with hd I used the special paste<br>feature to paste clips over other clips and keep the original audio.
<br>Since I installed imovie 08 this feature doesn't work when I am<br>editing in hd. It also seems that the help files know nothing about<br>this feature. Maybe the hd help file has been replaced with the 08<br>help file and this feature is not available in 08. Any thoughts on
<br>what is happening here and how to resolve it so I can use the special<br>paste feature. My os is 10.4.11 on a intel core 2 duo. Imovie hd is<br>6.0.3<br>Rob<br></blockquote></div><br>-- <br>Gordon B. Alley<br><a href="http://www.gordonalley.com">
http://www.gordonalley.com</a>