Daisy chain isight imovie not working

Question

Hi,
I am currently botting my mac mini off an external hard drive. When I daisy chain the isight it works fine with ichat, but it fails to work with imovie. What happens is that it works for approx. 10 to 15 seconds and then the image skips(like an old tv skipping horizontally) and the image freezes. Any help would be widely appreciated.
Thanks,
Gmas.

Answer 1

You're welcome, Gmas.
And thank you for the kind words. It sounds like you have a good plan.
Bill's good suggestion may give you what you want if you can try that.
... it seems that the only option is buying a powered hub that works.I can think of some others:
-Be sure you have NO unnecessary apps running while you are recording.
-If you are using FileVault, try turning that off. There are known issues with FileVault and iMovie.
-You can try booting from your internal drive when you want to use iSight to see if iSight works acceptably with iMovie that way.
-You can make very short clips and edit them together in iMovie.
-Try adding light. Many who post here experience an iMovie video "freeze" that is not related to which drive is being used to boot. There seems to be a wide variation in how long recording can be done before the freeze occurs. Perhaps you are just experiencing the "iMovie freeze"? You can search iSight Discussions (up on level) for "iMovie freeze" (without the quote marks) to find several other users' experiences.
-The iMovie freeze can be caused by low light. iSight switches to 15 frames-per-second to improve picture quality in low-light conditions. This causes a conflict with iMovie, which expects standard DV input at a fixed frame rate.
-As explained in David Babsky's "Various iMovie/iSight problems" msg # 1, Jul 14, 2005 response to your post in iMovieHD Discussions, more light, iMovie HD, and keeping other apps that use iSight closed may (my emphasis) help.
-Try another app like EvoCam. The fifth item in the EvoCam FAQ claims that they have a fix for the iMovie freeze. Their work-around involves resetting the video channel. You can do the same thing manually in iMovie by just making shorter clips and editing them together.
-Although I do not know any that yield better results, there are other video clip capture apps included in the Some Applications you can use with iSight FAQ.
-For more specific iMovie help, you may also want to check out the FAQs and posts in the iMovie Discussions area applicable to the version you use. The iMovie users are watching there.
I know you wish it would work differently, but it obviously is not working the way you want. Perhaps one of these work-arounds can help you accomplish your desired outcome, even if you cannot attain it via your preferred methodology.
Please let us know if you find a satisfactory solution.
Cheers
   <small>EZ Jim</small>