importing movies in to iMovie

[Tim Merritt]

Trevor, iMovie only understands clips in the DV format - meaning it 
can't work with the eyeTV capture without converting it. DV clips 
have a data rate of approx 3.6 MB/sec, which means your 20 minute 
video will need more than 4GB of space. Ouch.

If you can't free up enough space to edit your clip in iMovie, you 
can work with it in QuickTime Pro ($29.95 for a code which unlocks 
the Pro features in QT), which doesn't give you a timeline but does 
allow adding titles, sound tracks, etc. It is *not* as intuitive as 
iMovie, however. There are really good tutorials at QuickTiming.org: 
http://quicktiming.org/tutorials.php, and at this link thanks to 
Google: http://edvista.com/claire/qt/.

There are other options as well: BTV Pro at 
http://www.bensoftware.com, and MovieWorks, which gives you a 
timeline, unlike the others I've mentioned.

But... since you already have an editor that will do more than any of 
these: iMovie. Since you plan on doing more work (and play! ;-)) in 
iMovie, rather than buying another editor I strongly suggest you 
invest in an exterior FireWire drive for your video captures. It'll 
keep your drive from getting so full and slowing down; I have a 120 
GB drive for my PowerBook that I've partitioned. One partition is for 
video projects and the other is for cloning my laptop as a backup. 
120 GB  or larger drives are continuing to fall in price; mine was 
about $160; watch the sales at dealmac.com or morestuff4less.com and 
you'll find a bargain.

Good luck.

>Message-Id: <p06100303bc75bacc911a@[212.76.83.146]>
>Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2004 09:56:55 +0300
>From: "Dr. Trevor J. Hutley" <hutley at geneva-link.ch>
>Subject: [Ti] importing movies in to iMovie
>
>
>Barry - I am pretty new at working with movies on my G4 Powerbook,
>but it is something I want to get in to.  I am trying to use Mac
>technology to make some snappy Keynote presentations, with movie
>clips, for lectures and short courses that I am preparing.
>
>
>I have a video (20 min) that I imported yesterday from VCR to my hard
>disk, using eyeTV.
>One click to save to the hard disk - pretty impressive by the way.
>I then exported the saved file as a QT movie, 400 Mb.
>
>Now, I want to work with the imported movie, edit it, add captions,
>sound etc etc.
>iMovie seems the right software to do this.
>I have a little experience with iMovie, using short video clips.
>Most of it is pretty intuitive.
>
>My problem now is that I cannot get the import of this new Quicktime
>movie (.mov) in to iMovie to complete.
>
>Each time it says that there is not enough disk space.  Yet I have
>more than 1.8 Gb free on all the disk partitions.   I have tried
>moving the Project folder, the source file, etc.  Tried dragging to
>import, using the Import function to import.  Always the same
>message, after a minute or two.
>
>Is there something else I need to know?
>Or is this another verion of the "disappearing disk space", I wonder?
>
>If you have any experience, tips or ideas, it would be of great help.
>
>Trevor


-- 

Tim Merritt
Video/Multimedia Manager
Instructional Technology Center
Georgia State University College of Education
http://itc.gsu.edu
http://dvforteachers.manilasites.com
404-651-0370 voice
404-651-2460 fax