Imovie locks up/crashes every time I drop a film clip into the project

Question

Almost every time that I drop in a film clip to my current project, iMovie locks up and crashes producing a long readout for Apple.  I've made plenty of projects, but this one is due by Friday. I have to keep waiting to close it and go back in.  Every so often, a clip will drop in perfectly.  Sometimes, just the audio drops in (no video).  This will take forever at this rate!  Any ideas?

Answer 1

You could try converting the clips to DV using MPEG Streamclip, then import the resulting QT DV clips into FCE. In MPEG Streamclip, select Export to QuickTime, then select Compression = "Apple DV/DVCPRO NTSC" with a 720x480 frame size. I don't think that selecting "Other" frame size will work, I suspect it would still require rendering once in FCE.
Alternatives
You could also try using MPEG Streamclip to convert the video to Apple Intermediate Codec, selecting the 1280x720 (HDTV 720p) frame size .
You might look into whether your camcorder can downconvert the video to DV during playback, and recapture the video in FCE using the DV-NTSC easy setup.
Provided one of these 3 techniques works, it will be better & faster than rendering your existing video clips in FCE.