iMovie '08 Help

Hello,

I am new here and registered specifically to see if anyone here could help me.

I recently switched to using the mid-range Macbook (2.2) from an HP series laptop and was eager to try out iMovie, having heard it was superior to Windows Movie Maker. However, I was disappointed to note that even importing a 2 minute mp4 clip took an upwards of 20 minutes; all to generate the thumbnails. Why is this?

I decided to give it the benefit of the doubt and tried uploading about 40 minutes of footage to be edited and left it going overnight. Most certainly, WMM would've handled this just fine but it stopped half way through the thumbnail generation and now freezes because those clips are stuck in the lower clip window (which shows all clips added to iMovie) even AFTER I deleted the file from my computer.

Why is it being so inefficient? I even tried using a previous version of iMovie and had the same results; stupidly long import times, most of which was spent making thumbnails. Moreover, every time I open iMovie, it freezes because of clips that no longer exist.

Can anyone help? I'm really disappointed and I'm currently using a friend's PC to make a simple video montage that I thought would be accomplished much more easily on this "superior" editing software...

What are the details of those mp4 clips. Are they Microsoft or DiVX non spec mp4 files? Size? Bit Rate? Source? Perhaps you should be using a tool to convert them. Admittedly, 20 minutes to import 2 minutes of video sounds high, but it's hard to say why.

I have to assume the files you mentioned you deleted are what you were importing. The thing is iMovie 08 is maybe converting those and placing copies in its folder structure, so you didn't delete what iM08 is looking at now. They would be in "~/Movies/iMovie Events/yourEventName" and closing iMovie and removing that event or content within it might help you.

It sounds to me like the source you are supplying is being converted to the Apple Intermediate Codec that iMove prefers when you feed it something it can't edit natively. I just feed iM08 an H.264 file and it did not need to convert it, but did create the thumbnail of course.

You could navigate to the evet folder, control click on the movie file to open it in QuickTime, and get information on the file format. This could tell you if the format has changed.

Codecs are a tricky mess.

I ripped the movie from a DVD to my computer using the HandBrake application and it is a 36.5 MB MPEG-4 file. That seems a bit large and might explain it...If that's the case, how do I convert the file to speed up this process. The most I need from a quality standpoint is the ability to be seen clearly on YouTube.

An update: The thumbnails take the longest to generate. I don't understand how this cold be... The video itself is done within seconds.

The thumbnails are smaller QuickTime files of your import. That is why you can scrub through them so quickly. That conversion takes time.