[Kambei]

Okay,

A week ago, and for months before that, everything worked fine with iMovie. I only have a 20GB, iMac DV Edition though -- so I'd have to stop Importing after roughly 30 minutes of DV and Export, which takes 80+ minutes.

PROBLEM 1:
So I bought a ClubMac Firewire case for a 30GB IDE HD, and tried Importing directly to it, and sometimes after less than a minute -- and sometimes after as long as 10 minutes -- I'd get the spinning rainbow, and no response from iMovie, and I'm forced to Force Quit it.

PROBLEM 2:
I figured, Firewire or not, maybe it was just a slow IDE HD in the FW case, so I optioned to Import to the 20GB iMac HD for my 20-30 minute intervals, and drop the DV files onto the Firewire HD, and do my editting and exporting via it, after compiling large amounts of DV.

That worked fine. HOWEVER; after installing the latest OSX updates, but not necessarily right after installation of them, when I import onto my regular iMac HD (without even having the Firewire HD turned on, or even hooked up for that matter!), I get sound skips. Sometimes only one quick skip in a 5 minute peroid, and sometimes one skip every minute. The picture doesn't appear to get effected, just a real quick skip of sound, which really sucks since I've been trying to convert analog music videos to DV, and then Quicktime.

Any ideas?

~Dakota Goldsworth

[TwinFeats]

I have a problem very similar to this trying to capture from my JVC DVM-90 to either my 400 mhz G4 desktop system or my 466 mhz iBook, in both cases trying to capture to my VST 60 gig firewire hard drive. If I capture to the internal hard drive, everything is fine. When I try to capture to the external firewire drive, just like you said, after some random period of time - 1 minute or 10 - my import just stops. Mine doesn't freeze, the video window just goes blue and the import stops even tho the tape is still playing on the JVC. I did the math and what I assume is happening is a firewire bandwidth issue - firewire is 400 mbits/sec, if you capture a dv at 640x480 (isn't it actually like 720x640 or something?) at 30 fps at 24 bits, that comes to about 210 megabits/sec. Since the firewire bus has to both capture at this rate as well as send it to the firewire drive, wouldn't that require about 420 megabits/sec? I'm wondering if this issue is caused when the capacity of the firewire bus is exceeded. But if that's the issue, I'm a little ticked that the firewire harddrive vendors like VST go out of their way to say that their drives support DV capture....

[scottiB]

See:
http://www.barefeats.com/fire22.html
and http://www.barefeats.com/fire23.html

I use iMovie2 on both an iMac 400 and PowerBook G3 400 and have captured directly to a Maxtor 80GB FW drive (5400rpm, pre-Oxford 911) successfully; however, I've never tried to capture more than 15-20 mins of footage at a time.

Try importing in OS9, then editing in OSX. After completing projects, reformat the drive to eliminate fragmentation. Turn off file sharing, or create streamlined extension sets in OS 9. Make sure the iBook is plugged in to the electrical outlet.

I'm not sure about the audio popping.

[henry168]

I also use the PBG4 and external 60G hard drive without any problems. I imported as much as a full hour at a time, edited it, and exported to VCR and miniDV tape. BUT I'm still using OS9, that could be your problems.

Good luck!!

[Kambei]

Well, that's all a possibility -- but not really my problem. That was my first problem, my inability to import to my new IDE HD in a Firewire case. It gave me the spinning rainbow.

But my real problem at present is just importing to my iMac's regular ol' hard-drive. I'm able to do it -- but I get an occasional skip in the video/audio. I'm uncertain what's causing it (I think I mention above a number of "maybe's" that could be causing the problem, but none really make sense to me).

~Dakota Goldsworth
PS: No one's willing to let me know if 256MB's of RAM is probably causing the problem either. Is that not enough?