[Jason King]

I am using iMovie and my DV camcorder to convert some video from analog to digital (DVD). Well, the first thing...I can only import a clip 9:28:01 in length before it cuts to a new clip automatically. I think this may be a buffer limitation of iMovie since it occurs on both my laptop and desktop Mac's with very different configurations. Anyway, The problem is dropped frames in between the automatic cuts at that time spot during import. It will only drop 1 frame or so but it causes a skip in the video when I recombine it. This did not happen for a long time and just started; also I can import the video perfectly on my laptop, so I know it's not the camera (New Camcorder).

Any ideas?
Thanks for the help!

[scottiB]

Are you passing through to iMovie from an analog source or writing to DV tape first, then exporting?

Is the (I presume analog) tape old, dirty, etc.? Is your HD really fragmented? Just some thoughts....

[Jason King]

Well, I'm taping the analog source into my DVcam and them importing the video from my DVcam into iMovie. As far as my HD goes, I had the same thoughts, but I reformatted the drive just to be sure.

One new thing I've realized is that I used to have the firewire cable plugged directly into my Quicksilver, now I've plugged it in through a Firewire drive. On my laptop, I plugged it directly into the firewire port. I think that the DVcam needs to be plugged directly into the computer. I tried my old setup like that last night and had some limited success. I think the skip is still there but it now appears to be less than 1 frame.

I'm not sure, though, I'll have to do more testing.

Originally posted by scottiB:
<STRONG>Are you passing through to iMovie from an analog source or writing to DV tape first, then exporting?

Is the (I presume analog) tape old, dirty, etc.? Is your HD really fragmented? Just some thoughts....</STRONG>