isight in iMovie not working properly - unibody

[paolo-]

He, I've had my macbook for a while now and decided a few weeks back to try recording video from my iSight in iMovie and it didn't work. But I had used photoboot and skype quite a bit and skype crashed so I thought it probably had to do with that. I didn't bother restarting my computer to see if it was actually the problem.

So now, I restarted my computer. Photobooth and skype video work but I can't get my iSight to work in iMovie (I only have iMovie open when trying it). I looked around a bit and apparently the typical problem is that the iSight is not recognized at all. But mine is fully recognized.

When I first start the app, the click the camera icon to start recording, the iSight starts, I see myself and the green light is on, then I choose a destination. Then as soon as I click capture, it stops working completely, it sits at the same frame where I can see myself, starts recording but doesn't record anything anywhere. Then if I click done and re-click the camera icon it's still sitting at the same frame and my iSight camera isn't on... mind you in the bottom left corner there is the camera input thingy and it says built-in iSight.

Fairly odd... I never used iMovie, so it's possible that I'm not selecting an event properly or something really noobish, but I just use what it gives me by default, the current date as a new event.

Looking forward to fixing this!

 

[paolo-]

I hate bumping threads but this problem is quite annoying...

 

[jtibbitt]

You may not be using the software properly. Try recording some video again. You will see the video at the bottom right pane. It should show only a few frames side by side to make a long rectangle. All the frames of the video are there, it just does not show them. With a click-drag, select a portion of that rectangle (this is a portion of the video) and drag it to the upper window pane. Or you can select it then copy-paste to the upper window pane. With the video now up there, you can save as video file or whatever. That is how I use it.

 

[paolo-]

It seems like I managed to solve my problem.

I inserted the application install DVD in my macbook. Then I opened "Install Bundled Software". Then I did what seemed to be the "default install" even though it only marked everything as upgrades and required 0 bytes. After about 20 minutes it was done. And now it seems to be working fine.

I'm not too sure why it works... I'm guessing it might have been a problem with my external usb soundcard, mind you I did try deplugging it and then restarting iMovie, with no avail.

Anyways, it works now, yay. I hope this can help someone else too.