AVI into iMovie, SLOOWWWWW

[kirk.davis]

Why does it take so long to inport a 450Mb AVI into iMovie on my MacBook Pro? It's telling me that I'm going to have to wait for 1 hour???!?!??

I'm a video newbie so I'll explain my setup and what I'm trying to do and maybe one of you nice people could help

Basically, I have recorded some footage from TV onto a DVDRW, I've used Handbrake to convert this to AVI and I'm now importing the resultant AVI into iMovie HD. I'm using a MacBook Pro 1.83GHz with 512Mb RAM (another gig on the way!)

Thanks in advance for any thoughts!

 

[GoCubsGo]

It is encoding and depending upon your system specs, it will could take anywhere from 15 minutes to 2 hours...or more.
Such is life. I am encoding two avi's in toast to burn and so far it's taken about 30 min and it's not half done.

 

[mikemodena]

Why does it take so long to inport a 450Mb AVI into iMovie on my MacBook Pro? It's telling me that I'm going to have to wait for 1 hour???!?!??

I'm a video newbie so I'll explain my setup and what I'm trying to do and maybe one of you nice people could help

Basically, I have recorded some footage from TV onto a DVDRW, I've used Handbrake to convert this to AVI and I'm now importing the resultant AVI into iMovie HD. I'm using a MacBook Pro 1.83GHz with 512Mb RAM (another gig on the way!)

Thanks in advance for any thoughts!

I think when you have 1.5GB of RAM it will go much faster

 

[kirk.davis]

Hmmm, I've had to encode it on my PoweMac now; the MBP failed for some reason. Anyway, I've got a dual 2.0GHz G5 with 1.5Gb RAM and it doesn't seem any faster, does that sound right?

 

[bigbossbmb]

Converting AVI to something that iMovie can use is always slow and, in you case, an unnecessary step...When you converted in Handbrake you should've created a quicktime movie (mpeg4, h.264, whatever) instead of AVI.

 

[LethalWolfe]

Hmmm, I've had to encode it on my PoweMac now; the MBP failed for some reason. Anyway, I've got a dual 2.0GHz G5 with 1.5Gb RAM and it doesn't seem any faster, does that sound right?

RAM really has little bearing on it 'cause the encoding is proc intensive. Speaking of proc intensive, the dual core MBP is faster than the fastest single core G5 tower (which is the dual 2ghz, IIRC) in a number of rendering/endcoding tests.


Lethal

 

[eXan]

RAM really has little bearing on it 'cause the encoding is proc intensive. Speaking of proc intensive, the dual core MBP is faster than the fastest single core G5 tower (which is the dual 2ghz, IIRC) in a number of rendering/endcoding tests.


Lethal

encoding video is also HD-intensive

 

[Windowlicker]

You didn't say which kind of an avi the file is. DiVX maybe? In that case it sure is slow to import. The best format for imovie is .dv, since that's what it converts the video to anyway.