Apple Thoughts

Apple Thoughts - News & Reviews on all things Apple

Be sure to register in our forums and post your comments - we want to hear from you!


Android Thoughts

Loading feed...

Laptop Thoughts

Loading feed...

Digital Home Thoughts

Loading feed...




Go Back   Thoughts Media Forums > APPLE THOUGHTS > Apple Talk

 
 
Thread Tools Display Modes
Prev Previous Post   Next Post Next
  #1  
Old 05-16-2011, 04:30 PM
Jason Dunn
Executive Editor
Jason Dunn's Avatar
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 29,160
Default iMovie and Importing Video Files: Someone Explain This to Me

Hi there! Jason Dunn, OS X n00b, here again scratching my head about why I'm having such a hard time doing something that should be pretty simple. I'm hoping there's an iMovie '11 expert reading this site that can give me some insight, because I'm at the end of my wits with this particular program.

Here's the deal: I have a massive 48 GB AVI file that I digitized several years back; it's about five hours of footage captured from a VHS tape. Yes, in hindsight I probably should have captured it in smaller pieces, but when you're talking about real-time capture from a physical medium, it's easiest to just press record and walk away. I'm finally getting around to chopping the file up into a series of smaller clips, and I wanted to use iMovie '11 to do it.

I've grown fairly comfortable using iMovie '11 for editing videos and while it's slower than hell at the video encode (export) step - lacking GPU encode acceleration and only having a meagre 2.4 Ghz Core 2 Duo - the quality of the output is excellent and I find the application stable and fast...though it did crash on me last week (take that fanboys!). The problem I'm having, however, is getting this video file imported into the program.

For the codec-heads among you, here's what gSpot says about the AVI file:

My Mac Mini won't play the file back, so of course iMovie won't import it either. And, yes, I tried Perian - it didn't help. Because of quality loss I'm generally loathe to transcode one format to another just to be able to edit it, but in this case it seemed like my only option. And, hey, this is a VHS tape capture, so there's not a lot of quality to begin with. I did a short 60 second test transcode using a generic h.264 template found in TMPGEnc Video Mastering Works 5 and iMovie '11 wouldn't import it. With some grumbles, I tried again using the Quicktime MOV output template using the h.264 codec, tried importing that, and it worked. Victory!

I set my computer to transcode the massive 48 GB file, and seven hours later it was finished. For some odd reason, the transcode process only used one core and one thread; it seems the Quicktime encoder they use isn't multi-threaded. The resulting MOV file looks like this:

I tried importing it into iMovie '11, expecting success since the file format was the same, and guess what? It didn't work. iMovie unhelpfully showed me the file in the import window as greyed out. No error, no information, no explanation - it simply won't import the file. This is one of the things I haven't enjoyed about my Mac experience so far - the way, when something doesn't work, as I user I'm not told why.

So Apple Thoughts readers, any ideas? Is it the 32 GB file size that causing iMovie to not import it? Or something else? Every Web search I've tried has resulted in Apple support threads from 2007 without an answer...

__________________
Want to contact me personally? Use this. Want to read my personal blog? Check it out. Want to follow me on Twitter? Here you go.
 
Reply With Quote
 


Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off

Forum Jump


All times are GMT +1. The time now is 08:57 AM.