iMovie HD and Canon HV20 capture video problems.

Hi, if you Google -> canon hv 20 mac -- you will find all the info you need. It appears you will need a specific Firewire cable,,hope this helps..L

Hi, I checked the qualified devices list for Final Cut Express, which does seem to support similar cameras as iMovie, yet no CanonHV20 is listed. Also, please note that on some cameras 24 FPS is not supported. Your camera could fall under one of the follofwing conditions:

1. The device's LANC control functionality was not evaluated.
2. HDV mode currently supported in 720p30 format only.
3. 24fps is Not Currently Supported.
4. The HDV 1080i50 and DV PAL mode options have not yet been evaluated.

What version of iMovie do you have? Apparently in version 6.0.3 a number of stability issues have been addressed.

Sorry that I can't be of more help!

Cy

Two important things: plug the camera directly into the firewire port (not daisy chained from another device or through a hub), and capture to the internal drive (not a connected external drive). If you aren't doing both those things, do that and see if it fixes the problem. There's some issues with Apple's Firewire drivers that make this necessary (not just for this camera). Also, their software is not particularly tolerant of dropped frames.

The other thing is to use a decent cable. The higher-bandwidth video is going to require two things: a really good (preferably short and not passing by any motors/power supplies/unshielded power cables) cable, and not too much load on the computer (other than that incurred by the capture process.

That's all I can think of right off the bat. Final Cut and HD out not care about the frames-per-sec so long as the bit-rate is handled by the hardware.

You can try the cable, since that would be the easiest and cheapest solution, but I would be very surprised if the problem is your cable, but one never knows. The 4 points I posted in my previous message were actually from the qualified devices list that Apple provided.

By the way, did you check the preferences in iMovie? Perhaps you should uncheck "start a new clip at each scene break" under Import, if you want to import the entire 60 minutes of your film. Not sure if there is a Timecode issue with the clips on the camera, thus iMovie doesn't know how to interpret them. Have you tried connecting the camera with an open cassette compartment, to your iMac, then turning it on until it has been recognized and then inserting the tape to import the clips? There are a couple of guys who had a similar issue which they resolved by that funky solution.

I checked in some german forums and found most others having no problem with their Canon HV20 and iMovie or FCE. Definitely not a compatibility issue and your iMac has plenty of processing power to suck everything out of your camera!