Q: When importing old digital 8mm tapes, audio is only mono. How do I

Question

force stereo or add a second audio to the other speaker. It is annoying ot watch an hour's worth of movie with only sound form one speaker. I know I can do this in final cut, looking to do completely within iMovie '08.

Answer 1

A Digital-8 camera should have had a stereo mic built in, but maybe the tapes were recorded with an extra external mono mic connected. It happens.
The mono audio from one speaker can be copied to the other channel of the stereo track by either (a) sending the movie to GarageBand and doing the tweaking there by adjusting this 'pan' control:
(..click on the picture for a bigger, clearer version..)
..or by (b) 'Extracting' the audio within iMovie, and then editing the audio in another program such as Audacity or Sound Studio ..click the following little picture and then click 'Start Slideshow' for the details:
Although iMovie can handle several audio tracks, it expects each one to be in stereo and doesn't have the facility itself to move audio from one channel of the audio (..left or right..) to the other channel.
If you're not familiar with adjusting audio in iMovie '08, try watching Apple's iM'08 audio tutorial, here: http://www.apple.com/ilife/tutorials/#imovie-sharing-33
Finer tuning, or rather positioning, of audio, Extracting, etc - but still not this copying from left to right, or vice versa - is available in iMovie HD 6, which is downloadable from here. Both versions will happily work (separately) on one Mac.
"..looking to do completely within iMovie '08.." ..nope; can't be done: you'll need to import the movie into GarageBand for the simplest solution. Then export it from GarageBand and re-import into iMovie: