Welcome to Apple Discussions, itjaslee
Until you hear from some MacBook users, here are two things you can try:
(0) Best video quality requires much more light that what I (and most others) consider normal room light. Try using much brighter lighting.
As explained in this Apple kBase article, iSight switches to 15 frames-per-second to improve picture quality in what it considers "low-light conditions."
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=93235
This Apple kBase article gives you some more particulars about best types of lighting, etc.:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=93273
Both were written for the external iSight, but the same tips may help you.
(1) Best video quality requires lots of disk space and processor power. Your MacBook Pro has a very powerful processor, but any processor can be overloaded by the user.
Almost all external drives will be slower than your Mac's internal drive. Record direct to your internal (startup) drive. If your internal drive has less than 10 GB available, free up some space. OS X slows down when your drive gets too full.
If you have more than one applications running when you notice your problem, restart you Mac,
launch only the application you are using to record, and check your frame rate again.
If you need to post back for other suggestions, you might confirm that:
(a) your 15 fps is the actual recording speed versus the playback speed on your Mac.
(b) you have set the QT Broadcaster settings to 30 fps. To change the QTB frame rate, click the "Video" tab and check the box for "Enable Video Stream." Then set the frame rate and disable the video stream to make your recording.
(c) you have set iMovie HD's default frame rate per this help instruction:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=iMovie/HD/en/im172.html
Jim
G4 PB 1.67 GHz Mac OS X (10.4.9) G5 DP 1.8 External iSight
