iMovie export problem

[PD Turk]

Hi

I am doing a favor for a friend, taking video off mini DV videotapes and putting them on a hard drive for him. I hooked up the DV cam via firewire and it pulled the video into iMovie flawlessly, the tape is about 58 min long. The problem is, when I went to export from iMovie to mp4, the progress bar popped up and said initially that it would take 7 hours, then I checked back later and it said 9 hours, it just seems to stall out trying to process an hour's worth of video.

The machine is a Powermac G5 professional tower with dual 2.3 ghz processors and 6gb RAM so I know if the machine is operating normally, processing power is not a factor. I've looked at everything I can think of and can't find a thing wrong with the machine, I'm stumped as to why it's doing this.

edited to add: OS is OSX Leopard 10.5.8, iMovie version is i Movie '09

If anybody knows, I'd appreciate the help.

Thanks

[REP]

1. Well, with that OS/version, it is slow as iced shit

But you may want to check your settings to see what size you're exporting it as or even edit the raw footage. It should take about 2 hours or so.

Also try exporting to QuickTime.

[PD Turk]

2. Thanks

I tried the QT export, same slow crap. I've started thinking for this machine I might be better off running an older version of iMovie?

[REP]

3. I haven't used Snow Leopard in forever; I just remember running errands while movies converted

I'm using a 27" iMac 3.4Ghz i7 core with 12GB and iMovie '11 / Lion ... It takes just minutes now, thanks be.

Using QuickTime, did you export as .avi, mpeg-4, QuickTime movie (.mov)?

What size did you originally try to export as (480x360, 640x480, 720x540, 720p, 1080p)?

What's going on in Activity Monitor? Any threads running that shouldn't be?