Hi!

I'm doing a wedding video for my friend John, taped on my XL1.
I also, for fun, shot some video on a little Sony Cybershot camera. These come out as .MPG files. Am editing in iMovie 3.03 on an iBook G4.
iMovie won't import the MPG's, I guess it needs MOV's. I've tried changing .MPG into .MOV extension, but it doesn't work (it says "Error during import").
Anyone have a solution for this? Thanks!

http://www.alfanet.it/squared5/mpegstreamclip.html

Free program that should do what you are looking for.

That looks great, thanks. I guess I will need the "Apple MPEG-2 Playback Component" that the site is referring to.

No, all you need to do is pull in your MPG as a DV file, work on your video as you want and then use iDVD or whatever to burn it. Let iDVD or DVDSP worry about turning it into an MPEG2 file. Unless your camera captured it as MPEG2 instead of MPEG1...

Works like a dream, thanks again Mark!
Saved from the format jungle.

No, all you need to do is pull in your MPG as a DV file, work on your video as you want and then use iDVD or whatever to burn it. Let iDVD or DVDSP worry about turning it into an MPEG2 file. Unless your camera captured it as MPEG2 instead of MPEG1...

Hopefully somebody can help? I'm new to Mac and am trying to overcome a wall I've encountered. I need to edit in iMovie 09, but ALL of my media files are in .MPG format from a pair of Sony HDD cameras (literally thousands of files at this point). I'm attempting to swith to Mac after many frustrating days, weeks and months of software crashes and system freezing on the PC side with the likes of Pinnacle and Adobe software.

I understand that Mac does not like mpg files for some reason, so I will have to convert the files to use them in iMovie? In reading the above comment by Mark, it appears that maybe I don't need to convert these files? I hope I'm reading this correctly.... if so, how would I go about importing an MPG file as a DV file in iMovie 09? Any help is appreciated!

Thanks,
Ralph

Ralph, you have dredged up a thread that is over 3 years old referring to iMovie 3 on an old iBook G4. None of this discussion applies to using iMove '09 on a modern Intel Mac which will import most any video file format including MPEG2 just fine.

Hi Nigel.... yes I realize that this is an old topic... I searched the forums and could not find a conversation that is more recent or relevant. As far as I can tell is still a problem (at least it is for me). I'm attempting to import Mpeg-2 video into iMovie 09, but the application will not even let me click on an MPG file. If this is a long since resolved problem, I hope I'm just missing some small but important step and that somebody can just point that out to me.

Through trial and error, I've figured out how to convert my MPG files to a .MOV or .DV file and then transferring the converted files to the Mac for editing and DVD authoring.

Where I am at now... it would be nice to be able to pull those files into iMovie (or Final Cut if that would work better) without having to convert the formats up front.

Thanks,
Ralph