iMovie HD on G5

[havash]

After I've imported some clips into iMovie HD, it "letterboxes" the clips and squishes the clips. I need to know how to stop it from doing this.

Any help would be appreciated.

[Frobozz]

Try turning on Automatic DV Pillarboxing and Letterboxing in the Import preferences; or if that is on then turn it off.

[havash]

I looked for that but I could find it no where.

I'll go to check again.

[rumplestiltskin]

When you create a new iMovieHD project, you have a choice between letterbox (wide-screen) and 4:3 (normal). If your footage is 4:3, then create the project in that manner. Once the project has been created, there's nothing you can do to change it.

One thing to watch out for: Always start your tape with about ten seconds of footage in the correct format and, when importing your footage into iMovie, start the actual import a few seconds after the start of the tape. Some camcorders don't actually send the format code to iMovie until a few frames have already been recorded at the start of the tape. If you record in 16:9 but the first few frames are recognized by iMovie erroneously as 4:3, it will pillarbox the entire clip (black boxes at the sides).

[rumplestiltskin]

Oh yeah, that preference Frobozz mentioned is there under the "import" pref.

[havash]

Well I don't have the computer in front of me for now, but I will check again tomorrow.

When I start up a new project, I set it to the setting named "DV".

I'll need to check out those import settings.

[maetel99]

I believe what you are seeing is a bug in iMovie HD. There seem to be two ways of getting around the problem:

1. Import the audio and video separately
For some reason, if the video doesn't have accompanying audio, it comes in correctly as 4:3. Just lay the audio and video together on the timeline after import.

2. Save the movie as DV Stream
When you import the movie as DV Stream, again the problem doesn't exist. If you have an exisiting movie, you can use QuickTime Pro to export it into DV before importing into iMovie.

I hope Apple fixes this sometime soon.