Captured to external drive, now iMovie won't work

Question

I have a Mac formatted external drive and a friend (who is soon to become an ex-friend) talked me into capturing my movies on an external drive then editing from there (had been doing great up until then capturing to my internal drive). So I captured a 45 minute movie onto the external drive through the computer via iMovie. Used a Firewire 800 cable from the computer to the external HD and a 400 Firewire cable from the camera to the computer. It all went fine. Opened iMovie but instead of my normal event list, there were two folders marked "Event 1" and "Event 2". When I tried to clicked on the the first one, iMovie tried to "initialize" it but kept shutting down. I looked in the folder and the files were broken up into tiny 1 or 2 second movies which said "Q-DV". So I trashed those two folders then captured directly to the internal HD, but it did the same thing again! Made two folders which iMovie can't open. I looked in iMovie Preferences but don't see how to correct the problem. Have I ruined something?! I'm stuck. Can't do anything. Heeeeelllllp! (please)

Answer 1

Shame on me. I have to stop running to the forums every time some little thing goes wrong. Here's what happened: I tried to capture a project I had already rough cut on the PowerBook a few years back. The original was Super-8 footage which I'd had transferred professionally to a mini DV cassette. I had captured that on my PowerBook, done a rough cut, then transferred that to another brand new DV cassette. That's the one I tried transferring to the MacBook Pro. I'd done that before but with video originating from my DCR-PC100, so the source was DV. This morning I rooted around through my cassettes and found the original transfer cassette and tried capturing it directly to the internal drive of the MacBook Pro. It worked perfectly. So I guess the problem was the second generation capture of the Super-8 footage via the PowerBook (using iMovie2). However, I'm still dubious about capturing video through the MacBook (using the configuration I mentioned) to an external drive. Everything I've read so far about storing video on the external drive talks about moving it from the internal drive. I've yet to see anything about capturing to the external drive so I'm reluctant to ever try that again. Anyway, problem solved.