Under Doug

I had found the clips take by my recent model Sony (I felt they have suffered enough damage over their malware scheme, so I bought a Sony late last year) camera don’t work in IMovie.

The clips play fine in QuickTime, but if you bring them into IMovie to edit them, add a title, etc, you lose the audio. You would think this would just work. I have heard of similar problems from friends at work who use PCs and Windows Movie Maker.

The problem seems to be MPEGs encoded with multiplexed audio. Why this has to matter to consumer is beyond me. I imagine most people just give up.

To make it work, use a program like MPEG Streamclip to “demux” the audio in AIFF format. Import the orginal image from your camera into IMovie , then import the AIFF file created by MPEG Streamclip. I don’t exactly remember how I brought the audio clip into imovie, and had some weirdness when I cut and paste from the video clip, but managed to get it all working.

If I can downloads bits and peices of free software off the internet to transcode mpeg images and audio so IMovie can process them, you’d think IMovie would just contain that feature. I wonder what percent of mac users have a digital camera that creates a video format IMovie can’t natively work with - I’d guess about 70%.

Technorati Tags: video, mac, pc, imovie, windows movie make, usability

Posted on April 14th, 2006 under technology. RSS 2.0 feed. Leave a response, or trackback.