Unable to edit with iMovie

Hi,
I'm a new Mac owner. I think I made a good choice, but with anything new there is always a period of "getting to know you". That's why I'm glad to see such an active forum community here.
So, here goes... I have a digital camera that records .MOV videos, and I'd like to edit these videos with iMovie. I converted a few of these files using VisualHub. The .MOV files became .avi files. When I try to create a new project in iMovie, the view screen appears black, but the file name appears at the top of the view screen as: "My Movie.avi (MPEG-4)". Everything looks like it's working, but no video shows up to edit. Please let me know what I'm doing wrong, or not doing, etc.
Thanks,
Will
MacBook Mac OS X (10.4.9)

Hello Castaway,
I'm a new Mac owner. I think I made a good choice
I know you did don't let minor problems spoil it!
Now the serious part:
You'll need to learn a little about codecs (and containers). AVI and MOV are both containers that can contain a number of different codecs (a .mov file is a Quicktime movie file, while the .avi container is usually used on Windows platforms).
Have a look at Karsten Schlüter's website for some more on codecs:
http://homepage.mac.com/akschluter/CODEXX/
You say that your camera records a .mov file, but not in what codec. To find that out, try opening your file with QT, then hit Cmd+I to get the info on your video file.
I converted a few of these files using VisualHub. The .MOV files became .avi files.
I suspect that you have converted your files to DivX format (which is a flavor of MPEG-4). Instead convert your files to DV format, which is the native format for iMovie. Be warned, however, that every conversion makes for loss of quality.
hope this helps
mish

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