[Czachorski]

What do you mean by short clips? iMovie will limit the import of DV stream to 9:28 in one clip, which is 2 GB. However, iMovie will play right through the clip breaks without any notice. More details?

[Daft&Dewey-eyed]

Couple possibilities here:
If your disc is too slow, capture will fail because of dropped frames. The solution to this is to defrag your drive or capture to a faster drive. However, this problem usually results in not capturing anything, so I don't think it's your problem.
iMovie automatically starts a new clip every time it detects a cut in your recording. So every time you turned your camera off and back on, or hit the pause button, iMovie will begin a new clip. This is a useful feature, usually, but you can turn it off in the preferences. Just unclick the box next to "Automatically start new clip at scene break" in iMovie's preferences.
iMovie is limited to 2GB file sizes. That means that it will divide up your captured movie into 1.99GB files and clips. This is a limitation of iMovie that requires upgrading to Final Cut to overcome. You can capture your whole movie in the little clips and then string them together on the timeline and export as a raw DV movie to get one file.

[Macpaul]

After 01:22 it pauses, then a popup that says disc is too slow. End of clip. Problem is the VCR is still playing. I'd have to have a monitor set up also so I could then pause the tape, wait for the disc to catch up and then start a new clip? I bought Quicktime Pro so I could stream it to the disc, but ??? Scene break box was unclicked. This is a tape of 60 year old 8mm home movies so they're really important to me to be family treasures. Is there a way to stream the whole thing onto the disc?

[Daft&Dewey-eyed]

Sounds like maybe you need to do some disk maintenance. Disk fragmentation is the most common cause of a disk being too slow. The disk in a flat panel iMac should be able to handle video
Use Tech Tool Pro, or Drive 10, or Norton Utilities, or some other disk utility program to optimize or defragment your disk. This should speed up the access times of your disk and enable you to capture your video.

[Macpaul]

Thanks Daft, I had read about that aspect also, so in preparation, before I began all this I did defragment with Norton although it was light. The tape has sound, should I unplug the audio cord and just try for the video? BTW, I've got 65gig clean and available. Better software?

[Czachorski]

Well, I'm stumped. All I can offer is to tell you that I have a Dazzle Hollywood and I am using it to do the exact same thing you are on my Dual 867 Powermac. For me, it has worked wonderfully, and I have captured all those old VHS and 8 mm tapes to digital.
Good luck!

[Macpaul]

Well, maybe it'll work as is. I now have 28 clips = 1.58 gb. I'll have many more, but cant find a place in imovie to export to iDVD. Do they automaticly run together or how to put the clips back into a continous movie? I can't find these options in either program.

[Czachorski]

If they are continuous clips, just drag them from the clip pane to the timeline at the bottom of iMovie. Then there should be an iMovie tab in the options (next to audio, photos, clips, etc). You can use this tab to send your movie to iDVD, or you can select file>export and send the entire movie to a quicktime file at full quality, and then just drag the movie from wherever you exported it to into iDVD.
The 1.58 GB and 20 some clips just sounds wrong. That is only like 6 minutes of video. It seems strange that it is cutting those up into pieces for you. BTW - Daft, when you import analog from a bridge, iMovie does not recognize the scene breaks from your camcorder, because it is just a continusous analog source from your camcorder. I usually end up with a whole bunch of 9 min and 28 sec clips, as iMovie will automatically split the clips up a 2 GB each. Just FYI.
Good luck!

[Macpaul]

Thanks again for the replys. I did find out how to put it together in the timeline(I read the help in a larger window and found 'next'!) and ran crons with McJanitor again. I did get some longer clips and managed to put together about an hour of video. WHEW! Life is a learning experience, and I need all the help I can get. /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif I then exported to a Quicktime file at 320x240 to save for the time being. Before editing and the addition of a music track, it actually looks pretty faithful to the origional. Thanks again, I'll post of my success (or failure)

[muflyer]

I'm going to jump back in here since I started this whole thing. CZ: thanks for all the helpful advice. One other question, what setting do you use for audio? I know that can be varied, but I'm curious as to what gave you the best results?

[bull]

I'm interested in knowing that too. My inclination would be no compression, since an hour of 16-bit stereo at 44.1 kHz is roughly 600 MB, a small bite relative to the video file. But if one really needs to save space, what degree of compression results in the most acceptable reduction in audio quality?

[Czachorski]

Ahhhh yes. Audio. All this talk about video and we forgot to mention audio. Being Mac people here, is there anything other than mpeg4 audio, the same audio that Apple uses for the music store? I use mpeg4 audio set to a rate of 48 khz (the highest setting), 16 bit, stereo. These sound great to me and offer a decent compression.

[muflyer]

CZ: Thanks for all your input! Being new to all this...I am still slightly confused. Is there somewhere to go to get step by step instructions on how you walk through doing this? I am assuming you start the archiving the video you have to a QT file which is created on your HD. How do you proceed to archive that on a DVD? Do you do it through IDVD? When you say a Data DVD is that a DVD-ROM format? How do you accomplish that? At that point, am I safe to clear the other video off my HD as I have a editable format in MPEG4? Finally, if I later want to edit the video how do I accomplish that? Thanks, Chris

[joetaxpayer2001]

iMovie is tightly integrated with iDVD.
i start iMovie and hit 'play' then 'import'. clips accumulate at the 9min 28 secs mentioned above.
you then click the iDVD icon (after editing and setting up the timeline) and iDVD will launch and burn....