iMovie .dv clips to FCP 7 trouble.
 

A friend captured dv footage via his iMovie program. His version is approx. 3 years old. The files are .dv files. I transferred them to my macbook. In the Viewer the clips shutter and freeze during playback. They play fine using the Quicktime player and they play ok in the Canvas. What am I doing wrong?
Also I can't seem to load the Smoothcam filter into the clips? Anyone know why?
Thanks.

Hi Mark

Final Cit Pro does not like the DV stream format (.dv) ... in fact it really doesn't like any format where the audio and video are mixed into a single data stream. For best compatibility you need to transcode these file to the regular Quicktime Movie format (.mov). Thats easy enough to do from with Quicktime Player using the File > Export command, set the Export type to Movie to Quicktime Movie, then press Options and set the Video Settings >> Compressor >> to DV (PAL or NTSC depending on your region).
Another even easier app to use to do this is the free MPEG Streamclip app from Squared 5 - MPEG Streamclip video converter for Mac and Windows

Best
Andy

Thanks Andy. The video still shudders in the view but all else works great. I guess the moral of the story is that I should capture straight to FCP.
mark