Problems importing to iMovie 6.04

Using an emac g4 1.25 with 160gb and 1gb sdram on Leopard
I previously had an imac 700se and used to download my jvc camcorder without any problems. I purchased an emac with superdrive so that I could save the imovie and share it with idvd and make menus. The emac has been fine UNTIL I try to transer video from my mini dv camcorder.....I open Imovie 6.04 and plug in the firewire...it "sees" it and I press to import....all goes well for a few minutes then the images start to get jagged and the screen freezes. This locks up the emac and the only way to restart it is by switching the power off and doing a restart. This has happened 5 times now. I have run fsck and onyx to repair any permissions that may be out but without success. (also zapped the pram)
I do hope that I can resolve this...otherwise I may end up plugging the old but trusty imac in...downloading into imovie....and place the new movie onto an external disc so as to move it accross to the newer emac....this would be somewhat tedious.
Is there something else I can try to fix the problem?
I did notice once or twice when importing the footage into the emac that there was some splattering of pixels on the imported images (not on the camcorder). But after a restart it was fine.
Any help would be most welcome.
Regards
Geoff Coulson



LATER.....dam....it wont even see the camcorder now...could it be a bad preference? if so any ideas which one and do I just dump it and do a start?

So, you say it *does* work on the iMac? Might be good to confirm that, by firing it up. What version iMovie is on there? Same 6.04? What OS on the iMac. Just trying to see if there's some obvious difference between the 2. For a quick test regarding corrupt prefs, create a new User account and fire everything up from there. You can always delete it later, but it will give you a fresh Users folder with everything pristine.
As a side note, I'd say a good deal of my iMovie problems came down to a bug in whatever version I was using, but your issue may or may not have anything to do with that. I haven't looked, ...is 6.04 the latest of that variety?

Thanks for your reply, Antonio.
Firstly tried switching to a new user on the emac....it did the same thing.
Fired up the old imac which is running 10.4.11 with imovie 5.02. It imported all my video without a problem.
Decided to dust off my old copy of iLife 05 and install only imovie verion 5(having moved version 6.04 onto the desktop). Installed it and also the update to 5.02. Lo and behold....it imported all the footage from the camcorder. I shared it with idvd(which is from iLife 08 ...version 7.0.1)(the emac specs will not allow iLifes 08 imovie to run)....it shares fine although I do notice that there is some speckling on the bottom half of the playing window. I am now considering downgrading idvd to iLife 05 version...so that the 2 will match up and there should be no reason for there to be any conflict.
Any further comments would be welcome...thanks for your posting, Antonio
Regards
Geoff