HV20 import to iMovie 09 on an iMac 9,1...

[StevenB]

... I read through some of the posts about the capture issues with the HV20. I am a newbie (please be gentle). This is my first time trying to import to iMovie with a FW800 connection. I have 11 full tapes to capture. The first paragraph was what I almost posted and then I tried a fix. The second paragraph is after my second attempt. I understand about DV Lock (I read that I should be using it), but I really want to capture at full size in "real time" without and downgrading in the capture rate. My goal is to save at full size for backing up the tape. I will then save the tape for any future problems. Again, please be gentle on this newbie...

I am having problems with capturing video from this camera in real time at full size. The iMac has a 3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 4GB of DDR3, 1TB drive and ATI Radeon HD 4850. It seems it cannot handle it. Maybe iMovie 09 cannot handle it? iMovie captures at 1/8, 1/4, 1/2, 3/4 and then real time. It bounces back and forth. Any ideas?

...Well I went through the capture process again for the 60 minute tape after a re-start, and ensured that no other programs were running. All went well until after about 40 minutes and then it started capturing at 1/4 to 3/4 speed. It did this four times for about a minute or so and then caught back up. I have not had time to see if it caused any problems with the quality. Do you think the playback quality out of iMovie 09 would suffer when the capture is not done in real time? I checked RAM usage and it was max'ed out when the capture went down from "real time". So, I guess this iMac cannot handle HDV out of a Canon HV20 at full size? I believe that the 9,1 iMac can support 8GB of RAM, but unfortunately it only has two slots and 4GB sticks are still a bit expensive. Do any of you think a higher grade video program would support the 4GB better? Thanks in advance for any thoughts.

[HueyNRolf]

How is your external drive connected?

[StevenB]

I am connected with a FW800 cable from the HV20 to the back of the iMac. Is that what you were asking?

[HueyNRolf]

No, I just wondered if the 1TB drive is an external. It seems like you have more than enough horse power to work with HDV. I'd say you have a bottleneck somewhere.... I was guessing a USB (or slow) external HDD.

[StevenB]

I just checked my setting in how I am recording onto the tape and it is set at HDV(PF24) and not just HDV. All 10 of the tapes were recorded at this setting. Is that what could be causing me the problem? Will iMovie 09 support recording and capturing this type of video, or do I need to set the DV Lock on the camera and downgrade the output into iMovie. If iMovie will not support it, which video program will. Will this iMac (9,1) handle this type of capture with only 4GB of DDR3? I would really like to capture at the full size in real time at HDV(PF24). Any additional thoughts would be appreciated for this newbie.

[HueyNRolf]

iMovie doesn't support 24P, however PF24 is contained in a 60i stream. I don't know for sure, but I think it should work. So your 1TB drive is internal?

[StevenB]

The 1TB is internal. I wanted to pull everything off the tapes into iMovie 09 on the iMac and then see how much room it takes up. I may transfer the video's later to an external to free up space on the internal drive if needed. So, if iMovie 09 does not support HDV(PD24), then what program does and will the spec's of my iMac handle capturing? I hate to capture not in "full size" as then I do not have an actual copy of the tape to save to the hard drive. Then I have to re-capture the tape a second time and that just puts extra time on the heads. Any further thoughts.

[HueyNRolf]

To work in legit 24p you'll need to go to FCS. But, like I said, the 24p off the HV20 is wrapped in a 60i stream, maybe an iMovie user can confirm, but I think it should work. Transfer rates to your internal drive should be acceptable too. You have, for sure, enough horsepower. This is a stumper, have you tried another firewire cable?

[StevenB]

I am not sure about the 60i stream either. I thought HDV(PF24) was 24p. I have also recorded some in CIN MODE as well. Would that cause any grief? I just got a good cable and it seems fine. Do you think FCP will better utilize the processor and the RAM, as to not max out the RAM. That is what I think is slowing things down, but maybe it could also be HDV(PF24) and iMovie 09 are not playing nice together. I really thought that this iMac would handle HDV fine, maybe a bit better with 8GB of RAM though. I will check around for a good price on 4GB x 2 and that may help as well. I would hate to buy FCP and then still need the extra ram. Thanks again for all the help.

[Janke]

If your 4GB RAM is maxed out, there seems to be something in the background hogging your system... Did you check the CPU usage in Activity Monitor?

Since a HV20 can't shoot real 24p, you don't need FCP for that reason. iMovie should do OK, in fact, I capture everything from my HV30 with iMovie. I have a 2.4 GHz C2Duo, with 4GB RAM, never any speed problems.

Question: Is iMovie set to the correct import format? For HD capture, don't use DV lock, set iMovie to import 1440x1080i.

[StevenB]

I have about 97% CPU with iMovie idling and really very little running and hogging memory. Sure I can quit the applications to free up some ram, but I should not have to with such minimal usage. I did not use DV Lock because I wanted to capture at the full resolution only one time to save the heads. In iMovie 09 the pull-down for "import 1080 HD video as: Full - Original Size or Large - 960x540. I had it set at the "Full" setting for both imports. Thanks for the thoughts.

[StevenB]

One last thing that I wanted to check on... under iMovie Preferences under the video tab, it has two settings; NTSC - 30 fps or PAL - 25 fps. It defaults to NTSC - 30 fps. Is that the right video standard to use. Seems like it is. If the RAM is getting overloaded, maybe the cheapest fix is to get two sticks of 4GB and up the ram to 8GB. I think a 9,1 imac will support it. Again, thanks for all the help.

[Janke]

In California, NTSC is the right choice, unless you bought a PAL (European) camera...

The RAM shouldn't get overloaded, it doesn't on my 4 GB MacBook.

[cgbier]

very little running

Please define "very little". With 97% CPU there's something major running in the background. Please don't tell me you have an anti virus software installed.
One of your bottlenecks is your hard drive. The 5200 RPM drives Apple builds into the iMac are nothing to write home about. Capture to an external FW800 drive with 7200 RPM... that'll speed up many things.
4GB RAM is sufficient for iMovie.

[StevenB]

Well it is almost 0300 hours and I have had it for today, I mean yesterday. The 1TB internal hard drive is running at 7200 rpm's and I have 922GB of free space. By the way, this is the 24 inch iMac 9,1. I decided to re-install iLife 09 and see if that helped, and no it did not.

I ran another test. I re-started the iMac 9,1 and started all over. No other programs up and running and no anti-virus for the MAC. With Activity Monitor on one side of the screen, I was using about 1% of the CPU. I had 3.3GB of RAM free. I launched iMovie 09 and CPU usage went to about 5%. Free RAM went down to about 3.1GB. I started importing the HDV(PF24) tape from the HV20 via FW 800 to the back of the iMac. I imported at "Full Size" into iMovie 09. Everything was going fine. CPU usage was about 35% and free RAM was down to about 2.8GB. The free RAM dropped down to about 2.5GB after about 5 minutes and CPU usage stayed at about 36%.

After about 19 minutes the free RAM dropped really fast. It went from 2.3GB all the way down to 174MB in about 30 seconds and CPU usage went up to 61%. I was watching Activity Monitor and nothing else started up at all. Within 15 seconds I went from "real time capture" down to 1/2 speed. It was almost like the importing video over-took the available RAM and that was it.

As soon as I closed iMovie, with Activity Monitor still running, the free RAM came immediately back to 3.2GB and CPU usage back down to about 2%. I am at a loss! It is almost like at 19 minutes of importing HDV(PF24) iMovie just went belly up and sucked the RAM dry. I have been online for seven hours searching for a cause and cannot find one. I also have a MacBook Pro 4,1 with a 2.6GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB of DDR2, Nvidia 8600M GT and a 200GB 7200 rpm hard drive that has 120 GB available. I will try and import it into this computer later on today after I get some sleep and see what happens. I am also going to try and import at the lower setting of "large" and see what happens. Again, that is not optimal as I wanted to capture it at full size to archive and then have the tape as the ultimate back-up.

It really seems like iMovie just could not handle anymore than about 20 minutes of importing until it just crashed. Any thoughts on FCE and how it uses resources. Can it handle 63 minutes of importing HDV at full size without crapping out. I know I ran out of RAM, but I do not think it is to blame. The CPU is also not to blame.

As always, thanks for the help.

[askclifford]

Well, I have the same IMac as you except I am using the 9400M graphics, and I'm doing fine importing video in Final Cut Pro. Keep in mind, your computer is not really to blame. I was on a Sundance Movie shoot once, and they were using film cameras, a Panasonic P2 camcorder, and a Red One. They were editing most of the footage on scene, and they did the entire production on one laptop:

A silver unibody Macbook Pro 2.8ghz Core 2 Duo with 4gig ram and 256mb VRAM

Yours has a better cpu
It has better graphics
It has faster Ram

If you still have issues after adding more ram, make a claim on Your Applecare.
Its probably still there.

[Janke]

You shouldn't even have to add more RAM. The bottleneck seems to be transfer to hard disk - if that slows down, RAM usage goes up.

You don't have Time Vault on, do you? That would explain a lot!

[cgbier]

File Vault or Time Machine? Time machine could be an issue, but only works if you have an external connected. File Vault (IIRC) only acts when you turn off the machine.

There is a bottle in there. Looks like it is the transcoding to AIC or trouble with your SATA controller. Check read/write actions in the Activity Monitor.
I run two 2.4 GHz C2D (iMac and MacBook) and capture whole tapes in FCE, FCP and iMovie without issues. The capture lacks behind sometimes up to 17% on the MacBook, but I still get everything onto the drive.

[Janke]

I meant File Machine, of course...

[HueyNRolf]

Looks like it is the transcoding to AIC or trouble with your SATA controller. Check read/write actions in the Activity Monitor.

That looks likely to be along the right lines. If iMovie is treating HDV as AVCHD and transcoding to AIC on the fly, that could be your bottleneck!

[Janke]

OTOH, iMovie transcodes ordinary HDV to AIC without problems. Is your setting HDV 1440x1080, and not erroneously AVHCD 1920x1080? (I don't think the latter would work with a HV cam, even...)

[StevenB]

Well, here is how it went. I tried importing the same tape on my MacBook Pro 4,1 through iMovie 09 and had the same problem. I grabbed another tape and ran into the same problem. I grabbed a third and fourth tape and it went through fine. I used the "full size" setting on the third and forth and it worked fine. So, I re-installed iLife on the iMac and MacBook Pro and repaired all the permissions. I turned off Time Machine and everything else I could in Activity Monitor and went back to the first and second tape. Same problem of RAM hog and 1/8 capture speed after about 20 minutes of importing. So, after talking to the Apple folks, we decided that these tapes have some sort of issue. I was able to finally import them into iMovie at a lower setting. I will finish archiving the tapes this week and then move them off to an external hard-drive. I am sure that 10 hours of video is going to take up a pretty good amount of hard drive space. I think for now I will stick with recording at the HDV setting (60i) and not the HDV(PF24) setting to stop any further problems. If I choose to go back to the higher setting and turn it into true 24P, I am going to need to buy some additional software to do that anyway. I still like having the ultimate back-up of the tape in the event something happens, at least for now. As memory gets cheaper and cheaper, I will probably move into a new camcorder with flash memory and archive it onto an external disc for safe-keeping. Thanks again for all the help. I need to move on.

[Janke]

Tape is tape - are they all the same standard, i.e. 60i or 30p? Are there gaps in the recordings (taken out of camera in mid-tape) on the "difficult" tapes?

[askclifford]

Applecare?

[PhilSantoro]

I have a theory. Question, could the audio have been peaking at that 19 minute point? I have had the same issue while capturing HD footage (not importing from a tape but capturing live feed via firewire 800) from my HV20 directly into my Mac mini. I do believe, and I should be able to find our for sure soon, that when my audio is clipping or peaking the playback and capture gets slowed down or interrupted.