iMovie plug-ins by GeeThree.com
 

They just came out with volume 5 & 6
fantstic stuff,
I have all 1 to 6
love them
Bruce

iMovie 3.03 (can you use it with external drive?)
 

In FCP you can use external drives as most of you know.

Question, can you do the same thing with iMoive.

I was thinking, I guess if I put iMovie on the external drive, that would work.

apple doesn't support using external drives with FCP... external drives work for some people and not for others. It will depend on which Mac you have, whether or not the firewire bus is shared, how fragmented your drives are, which chipset/bridge your firewire enclosure is using, which drive is inside it, etc.

With iMovie you should install it onto an internal drive and put your projects on the external drive if you want to use them.

I'm not sure what you are talking about.

I've used Final Cut Pro with an external drives, and I'm sure most people do.

You can select which drive to use, using the strach disc.

What I'm asking is with iMovie, I believe it was meant to be a cheap edit solutoin and 99%of the people using it would use their internal harddrive.

Is there a way to use iMovie, but have the footage on the faster external drive?

right now I don't see how.

iMovie and external drives
 

There is no way within iMovie to specify the capture drive.

According to my copy of the iMovie manual, if you don't have enough hard drive space "you may want to install another hard disk or attach an external hard disk." That being said, you may run into all kinds of problems, as implied by Glenn. I have a 200GB 7200RPM Maxtor that I use for storage only. The one time I tried to export to my camcorder from files on the Maxtor, the end product was unusable. If you check other posts in this forum, you'll find others runnning FCX and FCP running into problems as well. For a better understanding of how divergent people's experiences can be, try the apple/support/discussions/iMovie forum.

With iMovie you can put/create your project file on an external drive for iMovie to capture to the external/firewire drive. Or you can move existing projects there by moving the folder then project files are in.

2- Regarding FCP and firewire drives, apple does not guarantee that firewire drives will work with Final Cut Pro. Some people have problems with firewire drives and some people don't.

3- Stick with internals if you can. If not then you probably have to go with the external drive route (which may not work...). Which Mac are you using?

Yes, You can have iMovie on the internal drive and edit on the external. I do it all the time. When it comes time to start a new project just specify where you want it.

As for problems capturing to the external drive there are many different causes. A common cause is the use of a Canon camera. There is something about Canon's implementation of firewire that doesn't quite work well with external drives.

As I have a Canon I regularly capture to my internal hard drive then move the entire folder to the external for editing. It works fine.

Same here. I have a Xternal Lacie 120GB, and so far it's been working fine with iMovie.

audio drift in Imovie
 

Anyone deal with audio drift in Imovie? How are you correcting this?

Also, I'm interested in getting a few helpful books on Final Cut Express. Recommendations?

Is your camera footage 32khz/12bit? It needs to be in 48khz/16bit.

16bits. The drift doesn't happen all the time. Here and there.

Ok I'm stumped.

I saw a nice FCE book in the Apple section at CompUSA, sorry but I don't remember the title.

How many frames does it drift and is it repeatable? There is not much you can adjust in iMovie. Have you tried recapturing the material? If so, does it drift in the same spot? You might try exporting and importing as a QuickTime. What version OS and iMovie are you using? How full is your hard drive and how much ram do you have? Does it only drift on longer captures? If so, you might want to limit the length of your captures.

Yeah, no audio timeline for video sound in Imovie! I haven't tried anything other than the original captures. Well, the reason I ask about FCE books is because I also have that to play with, it's just that I'm new to NLE and wanted to warm up on something simple.
But you know what. When I first got and used FCE two months ago, I captured footage shot with the same camera that I used to shoot the footage that I'm having trouble with in imovie. I captured quite a bit in FCE then, and almost all of it had to be rendered, it had this electonic booping throughout the audio (FCE's signal that material must be rendered, according to the manual). Could these issues be related?
Thanks Jeff for thoughts on books. If it's in print, I'll be able to find it. And thanks, Glenn, for giving it the old college whack :-) .