Trying to import big file into iMovie

May 22, 2009 3:05 PM

iMovie Question: I have a two-hour .avi movie file that I imported (File>Import>Movies), but for some reason it's only importing 19 minutes of it. I have the iLife 09 version of it. What am I doing wrong?
posted by Idiot Mittens to Education (4 answers total)

May be an index problem. Try to fix it by running it through Avidemux or Mpeg Streamclip and just copying the streams to a new AVI container.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 5:16 PM on May 22, 2009

I always have trouble with AVI files in Mac. Try downloading MPEG Streamclip and export to either DV or Quicktime (DV NTSC encoding).
posted by sswiller at 6:19 PM on May 22, 2009

Yeah, iMovie (& QT in general) seems to be iffy with AVI files. I suspect somewhere fairly fundamentally deep down it adheres to the original (old, old) AVI spec, which limits the frame index size to 32k - which, if you do the calculations for framerates between 24 and 30fps, works out between about 18 and 22 minutes...
posted by Pinback at 10:18 PM on May 22, 2009

Would you by any chance be capturing it to an external FAT32 hard drive?
posted by filmgeek at 6:46 AM on May 23, 2009