Slow Upload?

Hi Everyone,

First time poster

I'm new to IMovie so please bear with me!

I have a large amount of video to upload from our camcorder. When I started the process in IMovie I was amazed at how slow the upload is. It's uploading in slower than real time. Is this normal or am I missing a step?

The process seems rather painful!!

My camcorder is a Sony HDR-XR520.

Thanks for your help!

A bit of information about your Mac would be helpful - what model / cpu / gpu / version osx do you have? as well as what settings you've selected for your camera - most specifically the quality setting?

I'm using a Macbook but I also have an IMac that I can use.

Mac OS x 10.6.2
Is that the info you need?
As far as the camera settings...
It takes me about 30 minutes to generate the thumbnails (granted, I have a lot of video to upload).
Once i've done that and I select a specific clip to upload and it prompts me to select a location and size. I select:

1080i Video as Large

From there it uploads in slightly slower than real time.

Any thoughts? Sorry if I've missed anything!

Well, the amount of RAM and CPU power would be helpful as well (ie: go to the Apple -> About This Mac and it should tell you the processor and the memory)

It will take a while depending on how much video you have to index and depending on the speed of the connection, the speed of the CPU and the amount of RAM will all directly impact how long it will take.

You see, to use the video from that camera, which is recorded in AVCHD, it needs to be transcoded into a more edit-friendly format - which for iMovie is Apple Intermediate Codec (AIC). Transcoding video does take time, the longer the movie and the larger the original file, the longer it will take to transcode. Your camcorder has a variety of settings with which to record video, the highest setting, on average (based upon Sonys specs) will allow for 1750 minutes to be stored on the 240 gig internal drive, that means for every minute of video it's taking ~137mbyte (could be more or less depending on various things that make up the subject of the video, etc.) and that will take time to transfer and convert from AVCHD to AIC. In theory it should be quicker to transfer footage, but sometimes it's not...

It sounds like it is acting normally.

It's a good bet you are talking about iMovie 08 or 09, so I'll assume that.

iMovie converts the file to another format (that is optimized for editing) AND also creates thumbnails so that you can quickly review your content. There isn't magic to this, it takes time.

Thanks everyone!

Sounds like I need to be more patient

As far as my MacBook info (sorry...hehe...I'm a recent Apple convert...still a bit clueless)

Processor: 2.16 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
Memory: 2 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM

Maybe i'll try it on my IMac?

Thanks again...very helpful