I'm not at home right now so I can't do much testing, but the video clips had no audio at the end as soon as they were transcoded with 5dtorgb so I assume that's what caused the problem. My next step was going to be to try different frame rates with 5dtorgb and see if that solved the issue. I haven't been able to check much with the animate codec video that imovie created since the file is so huge that no media player on any of the machines is able to open it without crashing. I tried encoding the animate codec video to x264 with handbrake on mac but the resulting m4v file also wouldn't play without crashing, even though the file size was considerably less. Not sure what the next step from here is.

Probably a long shot but just throwing it out there: the 4 original, raw unedited mov files from my mark ii are uploaded to a .zip file on my website; I could also upload a lo-res video displaying the effect im trying to get by combining the 4. If someone wants to have a hand at joining the 4 raw clips in that style using an x264 codec or whatever else that would make the quality, color, levels and sound all come out relatively intact and similar to the originals, it would be *much* appreciated since the prospects of me being able to get it right in the next month or so do not look good. Like I said, probably a long shot, but I figured it couldn't hurt to ask