Video format for iMovie

[WarMachine]

I'm really stuck with this and can't figure out what might be wrong. Anyway, I have a bunch of videos that I recorded on my windows computer, they're in an uncompressed avi format (huge files). Since I wanted to use iMovie 09 for the editing I decided to convert them to mp4 using VisualHub (to compress them and so they would work with iMovie) and they seemed to work fine, I could still see the video on Quicktime. The problem is that I still can't add them to iMovie.

Whenever I add one of these videos as mp4 or dv (I've tried both) they go through the process of adding them to iMovie (copying, creating thumbnails, etc.) and then when it's finished, that's it. No video is actually added to the event. It happens all the time no matter what other options I change when converting the file. And by the way, I noticed the "Show All Clips" option at the bottom of the iMovie main window, it's not that.

Anyway, here's the info on one of the files, maybe you guys can tell if anything's wrong with it (from the Quicktime X info page of the video):

File: Video 4.mp4
Format: H.264, 800 x 600, Millions, AAC, 2 channels, 44100 Hz
FPS: 30
Data Size: 84.3 MB
Data Rate: 4,505.10 kbit/s
(This file goes through the process when I add it to iMovie, but doesn't actually get added)

Some of them have an 840 x 524 size instead of 800 x 600, but they still fail to get added to iMovie properly.

Anyway, I'm really stumped, any help is greatly appreciated.

 

[spinnerlys]

Use MPEG Streamclip to convert the .avi files to a QuickTime (.mov) using the Apple Intermediate Codec (AIC), as H264 is not meant for video editing.

 

[WarMachine]

It's been a while since I posted this, but I thought I should mention what happened in case anyone else has the same problem.

Thanks for your advice, but I was still having the problem viewing videos on iMovie even after that, regardless of what program I used to try to convert the videos, it turns out the problem was not the converters I was using, but the Quicktime components (the codecs that ultimately convert video files) themselves which were causing the problem.

I noticed recently when I was trying to view the Apple keynote (on the iPhone OS 4) on Quicktime I kept getting a black screen. So I looked at the QuickTime components and after a little trial and error, I noticed that getting rid of the QuickTimeH264.component in Macintosh HD/Library/QuickTime solved that problem. So it led me to think, if that component is faulty, maybe some others are too. So what I did was run the Leopard Install DVD using Pacifist and extract the QuickTime components from there to replace the old ones. As soon as I did that, the Apple keynote played perfectly on QuickTime and converting video to .mov worked for the files I was trying to add to iMovie. So there you go.

I have no idea how those QuickTime components got corrupted, but I'm glad everything is working again.