mpegs and imovie
my roommate found out about YouTube last week, and last night he started posting videos. which is fucking cool, that someone can get involved so quickly.
he has a sony digital camera that records video clips in "MPEG 1 muxed" format; iMovie (5.0.2) can't edit MPEG 1 or MPEG 2 video (because they were designed as play-only formats). "Muxed" is an excellent word; it means that the audio and video tracks are interlaced. In our case, iMovie imported the video just fine, but the audio was gone. Turns out you have to convert MPEG 1 and 2 videos to something else—DV, I guess, though MOV or AVI should work too—before you can edit them with iMovie. The solution I found initially was DropDV, which was wicked simple, but the free version puts a watermark on your video. Later I found the answer: MPEG Streamclip, which converts to and from a million different video formats, whth lots of options, plus does some basic editing.
This exact problem is discussed on the forums at appleinsider: MPG files and iMovie.., and also at macosxhints: Quicktime with the Sony.... I only found out about Streamclip after googling for "dropdv alternatives."
addition: some notes on converting movies for use in imovie.
