[hikouka]

So I've just downloaded my first set of New Year little 15 second mpg movies from my Sony Cybershot camera and dragged them into iMovie 3.03, but theres no sound with them . . .

Any one have any idea how to get iMovie to hear the joy of the New Year's countdown?

When I play them in Quick Time I can hear them just fine . . .

[Troll]

Originally posted by hikouka:
So I've just downloaded my first set of New Year little 15 second mpg movies from my Sony Cybershot camera and dragged them into iMovie 3.03, but theres no sound with them . . .

Any one have any idea how to get iMovie to hear the joy of the New Year's countdown?

When I play them in Quick Time I can hear them just fine . . .

Have you tried converting the mpgs to a DV stream?

[chris_h]

Originally posted by Troll:
Have you tried converting the mpgs to a DV stream?

That won't work.

Quicktime is absolutely and inexcusably STUPID when it comes to mpeg support. Quicktime can play mpegs, but can't demux them. (in mpegs, the video and audio are kinda sorta mushed together...demuxing means to separate the video and audio). If you try, for example, to export an mpeg in QuickTime to something else, it'll only export the video.
Now, the problem with iMovie is that everything has to be exported to .DV format. When you 'import' something in iMovie, all that's really happening is a QuickTime export to .DV from the original media (in this case an mpg). So, since QuickTime can't demux the mpeg, you get video only.

What you need to do is get an MPEG demuxing utility (search versiontracker, there are alot of programs that do this). My personal favorite is ffmpegX.
This will split the mpeg into an audio file and a video file, each of which you can eventually get into imovie separately.

Quicktime, as I understand it, used to be able to demux mpegs fine, and there is absolutely no excuse for such an embarrassing lack of simple functionality.
I've submitted feedback to apple a couple times, dating back to the public beta days.

Sorry to ramble, I've been up 44 hours but I hope that helped a little.

edit: if you use ffmpegX, you could convert an MPEG to a divx file (be sure to use mp3 audio and divx4/mpeg4 video), and assuming you have the divx.com quicktime plugin, you could import that divx file directly into imovie.

it may be easier though to use something like http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/14618 that simply demuxes the file.

[bartman00]

welcome to your nightmare! I tried working with some mpeg stuff on my Mac.. I had to give up. It's just such a pain in the ass. I tried almost everything and the audio would never be correct, to fast, to slow... somethging! It's a mess, total mess... good luck

Bart

[hikouka]

[
[B]welcome to your nightmare!

Thanks guys for the detailed info and observations. I've come to the same conclusion after mucking around for ages. It is all really a pain in the arse isn't it?

Approaching this problem from another direction I realised that iMovie and iPhoto just weren't doing it for me and searched around until I found an awesome program that handles mpgs and jpgs smoothly, creates awesome slideshows, allows multiple catagories and doesn't end up creating hundreds of bizarre folders on my computer like silly iPhoto does.

Anyway the program is iView MediaPro 2.0 and after importing a mixed collection of a thousand odd (some of them very odd!) mpgs and jpgs its already become my favorite app. 160 bucks is a bit steep but considering all the hours I've already wasted on iPhoto/iMovie and all the future troubles I'll no doubt have with them, iView seems well worth it.

Check out all the formats it can handle and cool things it can do on:
http://www.iview-multimedia.com/prod...pro/index.html

And guys lets all get some sleep . . .

[dtriska]

While I agree it's stupid that iMovie will import only the video and not the sound, I do hope you guys realize MPEG is a distribution format, and not an editing format. MPEG files were never meant to be edited such as the case with what most people want to do nowadays.