Hi Bill. I'm surprised anyone can import a two-hour movie into iMovie and edit it. Anytime I even tried one hour projects (iMovie 4 thru 6), by the time the project got that long the video and audio were coming unglued from each other and the program was getting so sluggish and buggy it was hard to continue. Switching to Final Cut Express was a tremendous relief despite the steep learning curve, and the increase in the quality of the video productions and the ease of creating them are incomparable. iMovie is a mug's game, in my opinion strictly for amateurs doing short children's birthday videos or recording vacations for family and friends. For any kind of serious video production, dump iMovie fast and get any version of Final Cut, learn to use it, and you'll wonder how you ever put up with iMovie.
Final Cut is confusing at first and not easy to master, but Tom Wolsky, the author of several tutorial books on Final Cut, is among many helpful people in the Apple Final Cut Express forum (here: <http://tinyurl.com/69jmgs>) who answer newbie questions fast when you're learning. When I bought Final Cut Express (for $300) I also got one of Wolsky's tutorial books with its DVD (here: <http://tinyurl.com/ yahht27>), and Helmut Koble's Final Cut Express for Dummies (here: <http://tinyurl.com/ydt4t9u>) and learned the program on the Mac with the books in my lap and a Safari bookmark to the Apple FCE forum. If you can get FCE for only $100 now, then there is no excuse not to dump iMovie and get serious about video production. Final Cut (both Express and Pro) outputs as an ordinary QuickTime movie that can simply be dropped into iDVD like any iMovie production (I'm using iDVD 7 and Toast 6 with OS 10.5.6 on a G5 2.0) and I just modify any of the stock iDVD templates to suit me, dropping in my own background pictures and music and then burning the iDVD project within the computer as a disk image that can be stored on a hard drive and used to make real DVDs. If I'm converting VHS or old Hi8 tapes, or importing a commercial movie, I feed them through a Canopus ADVC 300 into Final Cut, where editing and adding in scene selections is a breeze. Before I got the G5 I was doing all my Final Cut Express work quite easily on a QS 2002 dual 1G (I only got the G5 because I moved up to Final Cut Pro 5 and it wouldn't run on the G4). Some of the productions I made with FCE on the G4, which would have been quite impossible to do in iMovie, I put up on YouTube, here: <http:// tinyurl.com/6xdymg> or <http://tinyurl.com/6e698m>. Check those out and see if you could even begin to make such videos with iMovie. Once again, my advice is to chuck iMovie without delay and get Final Cut Express (which has most of the capabilities of Final Cut Pro) and you'll never look back, except with amazement that you ever put up with the frustrations and limitations of that stupid iMovie. -- You received this message because you are a member of G-Group, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to g3-5-list@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list
