canon vixia hf m300 camcorder importing movies into imovie 09

Once you get everything off the camera that you need, try reformatting the SDHC or SDXC card, using the menu of the camera. If you have a blank card somewhere, you can try this without erasing the other card. If this works, get in the habit of reformatting your card every two or three uses.

Just curious... Why do you want to import the movies using the camera? I have (and absolutely LOVE) a vixia M300 but I copy the entire card to my hard drive first using a (cheap) card reader. That way I have an archive of the card and I don't have to mess around with cables from the camera.

If you decide to do this, remember that you have to take the entire structure of the card - everything in the PRIVATE folder just as it is. I actually have a folder on my computer caller "sd_cards" and within that are sub-folders by date. The "Private" folders are dragged into those.

Now... I don't use iMovie (I prefer Final Cut) so I'm just guessing about this part but in Final Cut I just point to the desired "Private" folder and the program sees it just as if it were mounted from the camera and ingests the video from there. I would imagine that iMovie would behave the same way.

If you do decide to revert the vixia back to its original settings, remember that the default is for the **lowest** quality video setting (and that's really low quality!). You'll have to change that to something better. I usually choose the second highest