Importing a .mov Into iMovie Well... Sucks

[Littleodie914]

Hey guys, I've got a screencast I took using Snapz Pro, and it's saved as a .mov file on my desktop. It looks great, and is about 8 MB. When I import it into iMovie, however, every second or so there's a "twitch" in the video, where graphical anomalies appear around the edges of things, then settle away again. This happens with all .mov files I've tried.

So, is there any way to stop this from happening with a minimal loss of quality? I scoured the net and it seems this is just a general issue with iMovie importing video files, but I figured if anyone knew of a fix, I'd find it here.

 

[Gymnut]

I'm not familiar with Snapz Pro, but have you tried MPEGStreamclip to convert into a DV file to import in iMovie. The .mov is simply a container and perhaps whatever's in there is not playing nice with iMovie.

http://www.squared5.com/

 

[ppc_michael]

iMovie is primarily designed for editing [H]DV, which requires rather specific settings when exporting to MOV.

It is likely you probably exported your Snapz video to a video of lower resolution and/or different frame rate which would then certainly cause problems during any conversion.

The unfortunate thing about Snapz Pro X is that it doesn't save an intermediate file so you can't re-encode from the source.

 

[Littleodie914]

I'm not familiar with Snapz Pro, but have you tried MPEGStreamclip to convert into a DV file to import in iMovie. The .mov is simply a container and perhaps whatever's in there is not playing nice with iMovie.

http://www.squared5.com/

Hmm, I tried that, and I get an "The File Could Not Be Imported: Unknown Error" message.

Edit: It worked on the second clip I tried, not sure what went wrong with the first.

 

[Littleodie914]

Solution: I don't know for sure which of my changes did the trick, but here's what worked for me:

1) Change the Snapz Pro output format to DV at 25fps.
2) Change the iMovie framerate preference to 25fps.

Tah-dah! So I don't know whether it was the conversion from .mov to iMovie or a framerate issue, but I hope this helps someone!