Help - iMovie consistant export crash

[Erendiox]

Hey all. I just recently got my mom a 4-6pin for my mom's camcorder and we spent last night capturing a bunch of old DV tapes with iMovie. It was my first experience with the program actually, and I was very pleased. After filling my HD with about 7 gigs of raw DV, I decided the best way to store and archive this stuff would be to compress it down to H.264 at high quality, even if it would take a while, I was going to do it a tape at a time. I set it to export about 30 minutes of video that way and let it run overnight. I set my mom's iBook, the same model and OS, to do about the same amount of video the same way. Both were completely frozen by morning. I had to Apple+ctrl+power and force restart. I remember watching it go for a while before I went to bed. The estimated time just kept going up. It got to like 3 and a half hours when I looked at it last. Anyone else have a similar experience? I can't very well store all the hours of my mom's DV tapes in raw DV format .

 

[Applespider]

h.264 takes a very, very long time to process - particularly on an iBook. 30 minutes is quite a long bit of film. I tried with a 7 minute iMovie once and to get full quality h264 was estimating upwards of 3 hours and still rising.

One thing to check is that your energy saver settings are set to 'no sleep' and 'don't activate screen saver'.

Next suggestion, is to try just taking a few minutes of footage and testing to see how long that takes to process in various formats and check you're happy with the quality. Another good quality codec that doesn't take quite so long (you can find it under the Expert settings) is Sorenson 4.