iMovie wont play MPEG???

[ClutchNY]

:radioacti How do i get my MPEG clips onto iMovie? Is there a patch i need or something? If not, Is there a free conversion program i can download?

 

[yogi]

What happens when you just drag a clip into an iMovie project?

 

[ClutchNY]

it sayd quicktime cannot open the movie...

sorry im new to mac

 

[Amen-Moses]

it sayd quicktime cannot open the movie...

sorry im new to mac

There are literally hundreds of different "MPEG" formats out there, Quicktime can handle most of them and if you upgrade to Pro you can convert between them.

iMovie is more limited in only being able to handle a few of the formats but I believe that it uses Quicktime to convert them into DV first so you will need to figure out what flavour of "MPEG" they are and get the appropriate codec for them or alternatively find a program that can recognise them (VLC maybe?) and use it to convert them to a more standard format.

I know exactly how you feel as this is one of my major gripes, people use these shareware conversion programs to squeeze movies down to the absolute minimum size (which usually involves some esoteric mix of audio and video codecs in a weird wrapper) without any regard to whether they will then work on other machines.

(btw are you absolutely sure they are even MPEG files? They could be divX or AVI or something)

Amen-Moses

 

[ClutchNY]

i uploaded the files from a new sony HDD camera i got, they say (filename).MPG

 

[ClutchNY]

i tried downloading codecs,etc...mybe im not getting the right one?

all it says when i try to open the movie is "error opening movie, the movie could not be opened"

any other help would be great, thanks

 

[ClutchNY]

update, i dragged the clip into iMovie and i got a different error message

"QuickTime couldn’t parse it: -2048"

what does that mean? any help?

 

[Amen-Moses]

update, i dragged the clip into iMovie and i got a different error message

"QuickTime couldn’t parse it: -2048"

what does that mean? any help?

It is an mpeg format file but not one that Quicktime can understand, you will need to figure out exactly what format it is and convert it using a third party application.

The manual that came with your camera should have a section in it that gives the formatting details, if you can find that (or maybe give me the exact model number so I can try and find it myself) then I could attempt to find the right Application for you.

Have you tried VLC? You can download it at the Apple main download site (i.e go up to your little blue apple and click on "Mac OS X Software").

There are literally hundreds of different mpeg formats.

Amen-Moses

 

[Amen-Moses]

I did a little homework and the technical specs for one Sony HDD camera I looked at say it uses Mpeg2 encoding, VLC should be able to handle that and you can then save it to Mpeg4 or DV (which you will need to import it into iMovie, Quicktime or iDVD).

I think Apple sells a Mpeg2 add on for Quicktime Pro but I'm not sure about the details.

Amen-Moses

 

[kylecoop]

MPEG Streamclip

I had the same problem when i was trying to load video from my VDR camera to iMovie. Just load the video onto your computer with whatever format it gives you then use "MPEG Streamclip" to convert the files to .dv or something of that you know iMovie will read. A little of the quality is lost by this but you can fix that by exporting the video in a higher quality. Good luck.