If you own a SONY - HDR SR5E or similar.

Question

Hi _ do not waste your time, remaining hair, vocabulary of expletives on this piece of bloatware. I have been trying for some weeks to import HD files from my Camcorder to Imovie 08 and have finally thrown in the towel.
Go for FinalCutExpress 4
It is a little daunting and not intuitive in that familiar Apple sort of way, but it WILL get the job done.
It will "puke" at start-up because you don't have a Firewire connected camcorder - tough ***** babe - ignore it.
Then you won't find any obvious sort of menu item to import your HD files via USB - after ******* with it for a while I found FILE/LIST and TRANSFER
You get a list of the video sequences on the camcorder, just initiate a new project, select the files you want to associate with the new project then go make a cup of tea/mow lawn/wash car etc.
It saves automatically to a HDD location that you can specify somewhere - renaming it is OK, but copying to elsewhere makes FCE lose track of it.
Better wait till your "done" importing - then save your files to where you'd like in the Finder. Opening from that location will be OK as far as FCE goes.
Hope this helps those many people posting with "flames" about IM8

Answer 1

"Hi _ do not waste your time, remaining hair, vocabulary of expletives on this piece of bloatware. I have been trying for some weeks to import HD files from my Camcorder to Imovie 08 and have finally thrown in the towel.
Go for FinalCutExpress 4
It is a little daunting and not intuitive in that familiar Apple sort of way, but it WILL get the job done.
It will "puke" at start-up because you don't have a Firewire connected camcorder - tough ***** babe - ignore it.
Then you won't find any obvious sort of menu item to import your HD files via USB - after ***** with it for a while I found FILE/LIST and TRANSFER
You get a list of the video sequences on the camcorder, just initiate a new project, select the files you want to associate with the new project then go make a cup of tea/mow lawn/wash car etc.
It saves automatically to a HDD location that you can specify somewhere - renaming it is OK, but copying to elsewhere makes FCE lose track of it.
Better wait till your "done" importing - then save your files to where you'd like in the Finder. Opening from that location will be OK as far as FCE goes.
Hope this helps those many people posting with "flames" about IM8"
A small reprieve for iM8
Preferentially FCE saves imported HD sequences in LARGE format - my 30 Go on the SONY exploded to >300 Go on the external HDD.
Using iM8 to reimport the .mov files from FCE, creating new project, selecting the sequences for the project then EXPORT in MEDIUM format => drastic file size reduction and minimal quality loss.
Until iM8 gets around to supporting the in-house SONY file format of .mts - this will do as a work-around.
JT2