[Kambei]

A week ago, and for months before that, everything worked fine with iMovie. I only have a 20GB, iMac DV Edition though -- so I bought a Firewire casing for an IDE 30GB HD.

PROBLEM 1:
I tried Importing directly to the Firewire/IDE HD, and 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'd be left Force Quiting it.

PROBLEM 2:
I figured, Firewire case or not, maybe it was just a slow IDE HD in there, so I optioned to Import DV to the 20GB iMac HD for my limited 20-30 minute intervals (ie. limited HD space), and drop the DV files onto the Firewire HD to save for later compiling/editting with the more roboust 30GB HD.

That worked fine. HOWEVER; after installing the latest OSX updates, but not necessarily right after installation of them, when I Import DV onto my regular iMac HD (without even having the Firewire HD turned on, or even hooked up for that matter!), I get quick little 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 audio, which really bums since I've been trying to convert analog music videos to DV, and then Quicktime.

Any ideas?

~Dakota Goldsworth

[Hack3006]

i am sorry to say i do not have an answer for your problems, but i was wondering how do you like your dazzle, i have been looking into getting a dv converter but have not seen too many reviews of the dazzle.

[Kambei]

Well, barring that my recent problems aren't due to the Dazzle, heh -- I LOVE it. It's a lil' expensive, compared to something USB like MyTV (is that the name of those things?) -- but this is Firewire, so it's much faster and better for recording. I use Divx (is that the name of it? lol) for compression at this point, and it does the job for only costing $10.

Unfortunately, the whole DV experience isn't impressing me at this point, due to my previously mentioned problems. :-(

~Dakota Goldsworth

[peertimo]

I also had problems and small glitches during DV import on OSX.0.4. I updated to 10.1.1, and now it seems to be working just fine with import from a DV cam to an internal disk. I suspected the network to be the culprit of the glitches. It was simply not handled smoothly enough.

I tried to find a Dazzle here in Switzerland, but no one really wanted to sell me one. So yesterday I bought the Formac Studio instead. A bit more expensive, but also with a bulilt in TV and Radio tuner (actually worthless). I could never figure out from the Dazzle specs if there were in and out plugs for everything, or just one set of plugs with a in/out switch. The Studio has duplicates of everything. Works great! I can now import directly from digital satellite, DVD, VHS and TV, and at the same time print directly to DV cam without going through the Mac. Now if they could only make 120 minutes DV cassettes...

Hard disk speed is also very important. I have tried for years (since 7100 AV) to actually import video. NEVER EVER worked! I spent tons of money on SCSI cards and disks. But then it was the processor. With the 8500AV, UW-SCSI it actually was going somewhere, but then I got a DV cam, and had to buy a FireWire card. Again, never enough speed to actually get the stuff into the machine and out again. My latest set-up is a G4 with the SCSI card or my PowerBook FireWire. I am now finally online. Everything works in all directions. Now I just need to find some better way of storing this other than VCD, which really sucks. Looks like I have to scrap everything a purchase a new G4 with the SuperDrive. Any other suggestions on the DVD-front?