Stuck "letterboxing" on import from camcorder--what's going on?

I just bought my Macbook Pro TODAY and am making a two minute movie. I imported two segments of video, about two minutes each, from my camcorder using a firewire connection as directed in iMovie and in the camcorder directions. when I went to use the clips from the first segment iMovie said "Letterboxing. Please wait. This may take awhile." So I waited and waited and waited. It took like 15 minutes. With my brand new supersonic speed processor, 2 gigs of RAM, no other applications open, what was it doing to 2 minutes of video?
I thought it had to do with some wrong button or other I pushed having to do with the eerie iSight camera which was making me see myself type (so I tried to turn it off and ended up capturing myself.) This time however (second wo minutes of DV import) it's been "Letterboxing" for 25 minutes with no signs of stopping and it's not recording me. What's going on and how can I fix it??
Macbook Pro   Mac OS X (10.4.10)  
Macbook Pro   Mac OS X (10.4.10)  

It might be worth your while to view the iMovie tutorials at http://www.apple.com/ilife/tutorials/imovie/index.html because they can answer a lot of questions you may be having with your new computer.
If your iSight camera was on while you were trying to import video from your camera into iMovie, something was set wrong.

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