I've attached my notes, most only apply to version
2. Not too many people playing with version 1
anymore.
>From Ralph

Some highlights taken from the Macintouch iMovie archieve board.

http://www.macintouch.com/imovie.html

http://www.macintouch.com/imovie2.html

The Apple TIL 60616 states that iMovie is designed to operate at 800 x 600
and 1024 x 768 resolutions.

I discovered that when you export a movie in QT format with iMovie you can
*double* the speed by pressing spacebar or any other key. Try it yourself.

Conclusions are: The PCI bus of the 7500 will not permit DV export using
disks connected via a SCSI PCI card. Using a disk on the built-in external
SCSI bus will permit export with dropped frames. Using a reasonably fast disk
on the faster built-in internal SCSI bus permits DV export most of the time.

Probable: on 6500 and with a fast 7200rpm ata drive it should work ok.

Also a firewire drive should work as well:

on a PowerMac 7600, I have had excellent results capturing to and exporting
from an external Firewire drive. I built my Firewire drive using a Macally
Firewire case (part# CA-805FWH) and a Quantum Fireball LCT10 ATA/66 20.4GB
5400RPM drive. Using ATTO benchmarking tools, this drive has a 13MB/sec
sustained read rate and 14MB/sec sustained write rate on my machine. Using
this set up I can capture DV from my Canon ZR10 directly to my Firewire and I
can export the edited video from my Firewire drive to the ZR10. No problems
in either direction with either

iMovie or EditDV Unplugged. Capturing to, or exporting from, either of my
internal hard drives works fine as well. After over two months of extensive
DV editing on my system, I have yet to experience a single dropped frame.

On FireWire PCI cards:

Firewire PCI cards using TI's Firewire chip set seem to work OK.

It turned out that because I had the three Firewire extensions disabled,
iMovie booted and created a PAL format project by default. Once I re-enabled
the extensions, trashed the iMovie prefs, and rebooted, I was easily able to
get the converted clips into an NTSC project in iMovie. Another thing I
noticed is that as the tech note and posts indicate, you must convert the QT
movie to DV stream using the default settings, and leave the clip with the
.dv extension in the name, otherwise no go.

Upgraded Firewire extensions to 2.3.3 and it works like a charm.

(http://asu.info.apple.com/swupdates.nsf/artnum/n11632)

freeze on startup caused by: I eventually traced (through trial and error)
that the culprit was the "FireWire Support" extension, version 2.1. [I have
the QuickTime 4.1.1 FireWire Support/Enabler extensions in my folder
already.] Once I removed this extension...everything reverted to normal.

* Another reader is getting distortion in the audio track during loud
camcorder passages. The solution is to turn off virtual memory. (If that
doesn't work, turn off AudioFilter in the secret preferences document
described next.)

-open system folder

-open prefences folder

-open iMove preferences file

-Change the 1 to a 0 on this line--Option filterAudio:

In almost all instances users of FCP who upgraded to Quicktime 4.1.1 from
Quicktime 4.0.3 began to experience audio distortion or "Blasts". The cure?
Go back to Quicktime 4.0.3. I (we) did and all was well.

Once iMovie is launched, you cannot change the sound input method. If you
want to change to the built-in mic (from, let's say, the CD) you must do so
before launching iMovie.

* And one more juicy tip: If you're running Mac OS 9, you are NOT limited to
clips a maximum length of 2 GB (nine minutes)! Inside the System Folder ->
Preferences folder is an undocumented, EDITABLE "iMovie Preferences" file.
Among the useful parameters you can change is one called
AutoSceneDetectMaxBytes. Change it to 4 gigs (14 minutes), or 4 gigs (19
minutes), or whatever you like--that becomes the new maximum clip length.

2    gig = 9    min

4    gig = 18   min

6    gig = 27   min

6.66 gig = 30   min

7    gig = 31.5 min

8    gig = 36   min

Raw DV uses 215 MB per minute of screen time -- a half-hour project (if
you're that ambitious) requires more than 6 GB free for editing, and a CD-ROM
will only fit about three minutes of raw DV