A friend of mine is having problems in exporting iMovie documents to DV tape. He's a really great film maker (has had several films shown at the MoMA), and is trying to work via digital editing now. He bought an iMac (in part on my recommendation) in order to learn. What happens is that at some point in the export process, the sound gets a kind of hiccough, as if the sound dies out for an instant and then picks up again. It doesn't happen on playback in iMovie itself, just when the film is exported.<br><br>He's done the following to try to solve the problem:<br><br>1) Virtual Memory is off;<br>2) Sound Track Control Panel is set to none;<br>3) Sound level on clips is set at less than maximum;<br>4) Anti-virus is off (in fact, the iMac is not connected to the net, so he has no anti-virus software on the machine at all);<br>5) 100 MB of RAM allocated to iMovie (he's got a total of 192 MB of RAM).<br><br>He's running 9.1 on the iMac, and has iMovie 2.1.1. All the extensions are up to date.<br><br>Any help would be greatly appreciated.<br><br>By the way, he does have Final Cut, and ultimately wants to learn to use that software, but is really eager to work through iMovie because it's a consumer-level product, and he wants his students to be able to afford to use software.<br><br>And that's true too.--Shakespeare, King Lear

Since I'm sure everyone is dying to find out what's been going on with my friend's DV export problems, I thought I'd put in an update.<br><br>First, a student with an iBook, using the same initial raw footage, had no problem exporting from iMovie to DV film. Other friends of my friend with G4s also don't have the problem. On the other hand, yet another friend who has an iMac does have the problem. So it seems that the problem is specific to the iMac. (Incidentally, my friend went to the local Apple reseller, and some guy told him that he should expect less than perfection from a consumer model and a consumer app--some sales job for Apple products, don't you think?)<br><br>Anyway, he's now installed Final Cut 2, and he has had no problems exporting from that app. So the problem has to be somehow or other in the interface between iMovie and the DV camera. I thought maybe it might have something to do with Firewire extensions, but he does have the most recent ones. So who knows.<br><br>One more thing. The local Apple reseller wanted to try out iMovie on X on my friend's iMac, and installed an earlier version of OS X 10.1 than the one in general release. And they left it on his machine. Is that a violation of the licence agreement, I wonder?<br><br>And that's true too.--Shakespeare, King Lear