*Some* movies in iPhoto not showing in iMovie

Question

Over the last few years I have shot many movies on my Canon S400 and loaded them into iPhoto. All my movies are .avi format. However, iMovie is not recognizing them all so some are not showing up in the Event Library. This problem appeared directly after the last update when it rebuilt the thumbnail library. Does anyone know how to get iMovie to recognize the previously viewable videos?

Answer 1

Thanks, but I need to clarify - this is not a matter of iMovie 08 not recognizing compressed formats. All the movies are from the same camera, as raw .avi's, and non-compressed or edited in any way.
Please clarify further. Am interested in how you define what "raw AVI" is. Have never heard of any form of digitized audio or digitized video that was not coded (i.e., compressed) in one form or another. Please explain how that works. Better yet, please post a screen capture of of the QT Player "Inspector" window showing the format of this "raw AVI."
iMovie is for some reason erroneously not seeing some of them.
As stated above, iMovie '08 can't "see" anything it can't edit.
I was able to export one of the "unseen" videos to my desktop and import it into iMovie 08 from there
I hate to break the news to you, but exporting, by definition, implies a re-compression of the file. And, unless you exported to the very same compression format with the very same settings, you have "converted" the file. In fact, even then, the possibility exists that the file may have been 'flattened" with the end result that an incompatible track may have been discarded or merged into the core audio/video tracks and thus made the file compatible.
but that's a lot of needless hassle.
Better get used to it. Until you can show that both the audio and video tracks are compatible and that there is no other content (such as a "Tween" track) included in the file, there exists at least a presumption that your AVI files as uploaded from your digital camera may not be "edit" compatible with iMovie '08. You can, of course check on this yourself by comparing the the "Inspector" information of you non-importing files with that of your imported file.
All the videos are in the same .avi format.
Are you sure. Some digital cameras have multiple video clip modes which may either changed settings within the same compression formats or actually change the compression formats.
All of them were recognized and worked just fine before the last update. Now, some get recognized by iMovie 08, some others don't.
Apple may have changed "error trapping" routines for the update you referenced. It may be checking intersects of audio data rates against audio sampling rate "standards" now. If you check export combinations you will find that only certain combinations are allowed in QT. Once again, you could help yourself tremendously by simply comparing the statistics of files that work with those of ones that don't work.
This is NOT as issue due to compression formats.
You keep saying this but offer nothing in the way of evidence to support your assertions.