Imovie letterboxing how long does it take

Which is it? Your Mac, however, is not quite as dedicated a machine. So Apple did something very clever in iMovie HD: When it imports video from an HDV camcorder, it transcodes converts the signal into a much more lightly compressed format on your hard drive, using a new, virtually lossless compression scheme called the Apple Intermediate Codec AIC. Once the footage is safely aboard your hard drive, you can edit it just as easily and quickly as you can regular DV video.

When you export your finished movie back to the HDV camcorder, iMovie reconverts it to the more compressed format that the camcorder expects. A progress dialog box appears on the screen during this conversion process. But if you end the importing by clicking the Import button to turn it off , iMovie stops right away.

It throws away everything in its buffer, and keeps only what it has already transcoded. You also need some source of HDTV programming, like an upgraded cable box or a special rooftop antenna. That designation just means,"high-def video recorded on a standard MiniDV tape. Anyway, it takes only a few minutes. Sometimes permissions and preferences can get corrupted. Whenever iMovie starts acting funny, a common maintenance procedure is to do the following: Delete preferences by closing iMovie and trashing the file com.

Open the Disk Utilities window and select the Mac hard drive icon at the top of the side pane at the left. Then click on the Repair Permissions button. When you have repaired permissions and deleted preferences, restart your computer and launch iMovie.

Be sure also that you have sufficient free disk space on your hard drive for iMovie to function correctly. After doing all of the above, relaunch iMovie and see whether you still have the problem. I went ahead and did the disk repair and got the same message. Is this the problem in iMovie? Also did the other stuff as well. Imported and known good clip from another iMovie in a new project and it held.

But when I try with these Quicktime clips it letterboxes them. I also tried importing good clips that held, saved the project, shut down iMovie and went back in and the same result; letterbox upon import.

Anything left to do??? User profile for user: Klaus1 Klaus1. Permissions you can ignore on This is because an update to Leopard changed the location of a number of system components. As long as you see, "Permissions Repair Complete" when it's finished Sep 29, PM in response to Omega88 In response to Omega88 The only thing I can come up with is to purchase Quicktime Pro and follow the suggestion in one of my earlier posts using that program.

It seems to me that your problematic Quicktime clips must be containing some kind of flag that is telling iMovie to letterbox them. Exporting them to DV stream and then importing them to iMovie might solve it. As I recall, Quicktime Pro is a fairly inexpensive program. If this is indeed content related, might it be possible for you to live with the clips being letterboxed?

Sometimes one needs to go with what the program will give, aggravating as it may be. Then to iMovie and it worked but the quality was not good. The only other option I can see is to learn iMovie Problem is they removed the timeline in that version and 06 has it and it is so much easier. Thanks for all your help. Again, scratching my head here that this was the one you awarded, even after my replies.

Marque Your method doesn't do what I need. See my comment. This is the wrong answer, see lorenzo's answer below! Show 2 more comments. Lorenzo Boccaccia Lorenzo Boccaccia 2 2 silver badges 2 2 bronze badges. Brian Brian 71 1 1 silver badge 1 1 bronze badge. Dan C Dan C 31 1 1 bronze badge. Mark A. Donohoe Mark A. Donohoe 2 2 silver badges 8 8 bronze badges. Marque But the point is that I need to crop to something that isn't a standard aspect ratio. As I said, you choose the resolution when you do the export.

You can make it whatever you want, which means you can make it whatever aspect ratio you want. For instance, if you wanted a square aspect ratio, you'd just make the width and height the same. If you wanted a aspect ratio, you'd just make the width twice as much as the height. Whatever aspect ratio you want, just set the resolution to match. It's simple math. Marque Yes, I know. The point is that I want the aspect ratio to be different than the rest of the project.

So, setting a global ratio when I export won't help. In that case, you have to create the part that you want as a different aspect ratio as a second project, then export it as its own video Since it will have a different aspect ratio than your current video, you can play with the cropping features there. Marque Haha, good point. My bad for not being clear. Show 5 more comments.

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