New Canon FS10, FS11,FS100

i am also getting a NO NAME icon appear and with iMovie08.

I connect the camera to my MBP which runs leopard. turned the camera on and opened imovie. it then takes a while create thumb names, then it asks to download all , it then takes 4 mins to download and then i get an error message saying it had a problem with 38/40 , i press done and nothing is there.

HELP !

here is how my day panned out regarding my FS100.

went to apple, spoke to a genius, he didn't have a clue.
then spoke to canon, they said, if the mac is seeing the camera drive, then there is nothing wrong with the camera and its a mac issue, but try a company called pixela, who make our video image software but only for PC.

spoke a charming lady somewhere in the far east ( thought she was US ) and she couldn't help but did point out it was a Imovie08 problem, maybe a mod converter would be the best bet.

SO back to forum surfing and tried dragging the mod files off the camera to the hardrive to see if that made a difference... yep you guessed it, NO!

so back to apple.. and at 18:17pm up pops an update for iLife08 including a big file for iMovie.. I nearly jumped off my chair !

so i waited the 5 - 10 mins for the update. then restarted the machine, opened iMovie, plugged int he FS100, let it create the thumb nails, then selected one clip as a test, and same result, ERROR !!!!

whats the point of releasing an update today if the sodding thing won't support the FS100 ??? and if you look at the support page of iMovie is clearly shows the FS100 !

so i suppose my next bet is to ring apple again and have a right go !

i can feel my hair turning grey !

anyone else had much luck ?

ok, update.

spoke to apple care, and they said go down to an apple store with camera and try and import movie into imovie08 on a machine there with same spec, i.e leopard same version and same version of imovie08 7.1.4.

this I did, and hey presto it imported with no problems.

so now I have a problem with my MBP and it importing and then giving me an error.

so i uninstalled just imovie08, reloaded and did the updates, crossed my fingers and NOTHING !

so apart from doing an archive and install on leopard, its a setting, codec or conflict...

HELP !!!!

Just tried the FS100 today. Plugged it in, opened iMovie '08, and immediately it said "Camera detected" . Took a while to load the clips and then to produce thumbnails, but all-in-all a painless process. Great camera, happy with quality.

Running 10.5.4 on a Macbook Pro. All the updates have been done including the recent iLife/iMove updates.

I'm broadly happy with my FS100 - it works quite smoothly with iMovie'08 on my MacBook Pro. A few notes:

— It doesn't seem to mount properly unless I connect its power adaptor as well as the USB cable. This is surprisingly annoying, and in practice I'll mostly end up popping the card out. Except that:

— The card door is underneath the camera, so you have to remove a tripod plate if you have one fitted. Grrr.

— Low light performance is bad. Gain speckle is highly chromatic, and worse than with my Flip Ultra under similar conditions. The FS100's sensor is very small, and it shows.

— In more reasonable light - ie. outdoors during the day - the picture is pretty good. It's roughly on a par with my old Sony miniDV camera, a PC8E - one of the better single-chip DV cameras. Flip Ultra gets surprisingly close in many conditions, but ultimately the FS100 or miniDV cameras have more flexible lenses.

— That said, the long end of the zoom is basically useless; there seems to be some odd feedback with the image stabiliser and the 'advanced zoom' sensor cropping (not quite digital zoom - the sensor appears to be oversize for the resolution). However, if you turn the 'advanced zoom' off, the lens no longer zooms out so wide. Bizarre, and since the focal range is rather long anyway, extremely frustrating. In the end I leave Advanced Zoom on and try to remember not to zoom all the way in.

— On the plus side, the minimum focus distance at extreme wide zoom is amazing. It's very nearly inside the lens shutter. Astonishing macro potential for a cheap camera.

— I've successfully hung a Rode NTG-2 shotgun mic off the jack input, with excellent results. By the time you have the mic, mount, fishpole, and cables you've spent more than the camera, but if you happen to have the bits to hand it's extremely effective. (The NTG-2 will take a battery in lieu of phantom power; you'll need an XLR-to-3.5mm cable to make it work).

— The NTG-2 (and my wired and wireless radio mics) are all mono, which of course comes out on the left channel only. I must buy an adaptor plug.

— There's no headphone jack on the FS100... but if you plug your headphones (iPod earbuds, etc) not quite all the way into the yellow AV jack, you can at least check that the camera is receiving clean audio. No volume control, but it's better than trusting to luck.

It's a decent camera, but don't expect wonders. If you want a camera to carry everywhere and muck about with, the Flip Ultra is surprisingly good (and works OK with iMovie'08 once you've installed the plugin). The FS100 is the cheapest flash-media camera I've seen with a mic input. There are cheaper miniDV cameras, but they're not great either.

For my money, the FS100 is about as good as anything this side of an HF100 or HV30. I'm not entirely happy with the low-light picture, but the microphone jack is highly significant to me. Otherwise, I have to say I think the Flip Ultra is a little gem, but that's another matter.

Hi Charles,

You seem to have a really good grasp of how to convert Canon FS100 files on a Mac, so I'm desperately hoping you can help me here. My employer recently purchased the FS100 after I did a lot of research on which type of camera would work best for our company's purposes. It sounded like converting files to .mov or.mp4's was going to be simple enough. I have iMovie 06 on my laptop, so importing the files straight into that program isn't an option. Another coworker, who has iMovie 08 installed, tried to import the files and iMovie 08 froze several times on his Mac. I have tried two different converters recommended to me — the 4Media Video converter and ffmpegX — and both converted the files, however the sound is completely off on the videos. The video plays, but the sound doesn't match up with the video. The videos play fine on the camera. I'm wondering if there's a different converter you'd recommend. I'm willing to try anything at this point, but having tried two converters and having the same result I'm starting to get a little frustrated. Any advice you could offer would be greatly appreciated. Thanks so much!

I love the camera; small size, easy to use. What kills me though is that using a G5 I'm unable to utilize the iMovie'08 (intel only) which has left me with no easy solution for grabbing video off the SDHC internal chip of my FS100.

So far I haven't tried any of the alternative solutions here but I have tried using Handbrake to convert the .MOD files to mp4's. It works, but I don't believe it is working correctly. When I view the resulting movie its a standard square image (4:3?) and not the widescreen image I'm used to seeing on the cameras view finder. I've even tried tweaking the picture settings prior to conversion to keep the same aspect ratio but this doesn't seem to do it. Has anyone else tried this? The video should be converted to widescreen format, right? I assume if I had an Intel mac with iMovie'08 the imported video would be widescreen right?

Anyway, any advice would be welcome.

I'm not sure if you are thinking that you can only use iMovie '08 with an intel processor. I that's what your thinking then I have some good news for you...you can use all the iLife '08 apps without an intel mac. I've got a first generation G5 with power pc and use all iLife '08 apps just fine. My problem is that the video that I import form the FS10 is very choppy. Does anyone know if that's related to the non-intel issue? How can I get smooth video from my new camcorder on my machine?