imovie and drift HD

hi everyone, im having real problems trying to load my videos from my drift HD to imovie.
the files are .MOV, they appear to be uploading then disappear completely ? ive tried to change the format but im losing video quality, please help as im needing to edit these vids for a freinds project.
my macbook aluminium is 4 years old and is running on 10.5.8 ,
can i upgrade my system for free and then upgrade imovie to final cut . will this work ?
or is there another movie editing programe i can download and abandon imovie completely
really need to sort this as soon as possible. thanks in advance.....pete

Without the specs of your machine it's impossible to say whether you can upgrade or not, but I can tell you with certainty it won't be free. Luckily, it will be cheap.

I'm not certain what a Drift HD is so I can't be much help there, but it sure sounds like its actually creating movies in the dreaded AVCHD Lite format. You may need a third-party tool to convert to the files to Apple Intermediate Codec or ProRes in order to work with your video program of choice. I'm not sure but I've heard that MPEG Streamclip may be able to help and its free.

Apart from the difficulty with stupid proprietary camera-maker formats, what's wrong with iMovie?

Not saying a different program might fit your needs better, just that it's hard to determine what the actual problem is yet.

AVCHD Lite is no problem for iMovie 08 and up...It's almost always user error...upload the files from the SD card itself. Do not drill through the file structure yourself...import the files through the import drop down list...

Yes, you're right codda. There's some other variant of AVCHD that iMovie doesn't care for, I was misremembering.

codda said:

AVCHD Lite is no problem for iMovie 08 and up...It's almost always user error...upload the files from the SD card itself. Do not drill through the file structure yourself...import the files through the import drop down list...

Click to expand...

thanks for the answer, not to sound stupid, could you please explain a bit more.

As the OP says, a Drift HD camera records in .mov, format compressed to h.264, so codda's advice(which is correct for AVCHD movies) doesn't apply here.
Drift HD Action Camera

For iMovie editing, I would suggest recording at 25 or 30fps, then you should be able to import direct into iMovie.

ive tried to load from the card, and at 30fps and 25. imovie still dont want to know the .MOV files. so frustrating.
i can change the file format to AVI, DVIX, MPEG-4 but i lose quality badly. ive had this camera ages and i dont use it because of this problem. there must be an easy fix surely.
cheers

Did you try converting it to Apple Intermediate Codec? Try that. You can use MPEG Streamclip for that if you haven't already got it (it's free).