[warnergt]

Well, I took the plunge and picked up a Sony HDR-HC1
HD camcorder. Today, I took it for its first drive.
The video is awesome but iMovie HD 6 has some quirks.

I imported the video into the computer. It imports
at 1/2 real time. e.g. 15 minutes of video takes
30 minutes to import.

When I attempted to play the movie, iMovie hung on
me. In hindsight, it appears that there was some
corrupted data at the very beginning of the tape.
I waited and waited while my CPU was pegged at 100%
not knowing if this was normal processing or what.
I had to kill the application to get out of this hang.
It took a number of hangs/kills before I got out of
this loop.

In iMovie, the colors came and went. Sometimes the
color was perfect; other times it was a tint of
psychedelic purple/green. I don't know what the
heck was going on. It seems good now after I
created a new project.

The 16:9 movie was being displayed as 4:3.
Everything looked narrow. I created a new project
and this problem went away.

When I tried to use an external Firewire drive for
the project, it said "no camera connected."
Apparently, you can't connect to the camera
(with Firewire) when a Firewire drive is in use.
This is something else I learned the hard way.

The displayed video looked a little jumpy. I
believe it is only a display problem on my older
Mac (dual-1 GHz G4). While stepping through
the video,it looked fine. It is probably fine on a
fast Mac. The final result will probably be fine.

I'll try it out more tonight.

[iomatic]

Why didn't you opt for an HC90 instead (or soon-to-be released hc93)?

[sith33]

Iomatic - the HC90 is a standard def camera, whereas the HC1 is a high def camera.

Warnergt: You might want to try the apple discussion boards on iMovie, you'll probably get a better result. It shouldn't import in half real time - importing HDV is just copying data across the firewire port. I haven't tried with an HC1 though, but try the apple discussion boards and see what you find...

[sith33]

woops

[warnergt]

I discovered later that, while it was importing the movie at about 1/2 real time, the camcorder was playing at regular speed. Apparently, it reads the data in at full speed and caches it to transcode it to an intermediate format which iMovie uses. So the appearance of importing at 1/2 speed was a function of my processor speed (dual 1.0 GHz). A faster Mac would import faster -- possibly at full speed.

[warnergt]

Where is the Apple discussion board?

[iomatic]

Originally Posted by sith33

Iomatic - the HC90 is a standard def camera, whereas the HC1 is a high def camera. …

Ah. Thanks. (720p vs. 1080i?)

[warnergt]

HDR-HC1 is 1080i. HC90 is 480i.

[warnergt]

The Apple discussion board is here:
http://discussions.apple.com/forum.j...D=1115&start=0