I'm on iMovie HD (5.0.2) and I haven't been able to find much on this topic on google.
I've been converting some VHS's to DVD for my personal use.
I use an alchemy tv card and record to mpeg-4 (highest quality setting).
The result is a 9GB quicktime, interally encoded as mpeg4.
Theoretically this should import no problem into iMovie right? (Note: I'm importing into iMovie to trim things and split into chapters.)
Well, on my DP 1.25Ghz G4 the import process took 9 hours.
"Bah! Slow machine!" you say?
Well, I tried importing on my DP 2.5Ghz G5 and the estimated time to completion was 192 minutes. That's slower than realtime.
During the import there is little disk activity and iMovie uses 100% of 1 cpu.
Once the import is done, things are fine. but that import is a killer and ridiculous.
If it is internally recoding it into something else it should certainly go faster than this, especially on the G5.
Anybody else have problems like that?