Flashy movies

Congratulations with your magazine, I think it’s great, brilliantly explained, I love the gadgets pages. Now, the reason for my letter; I have a Mac Pro with OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, a hybrid 1TB for the main Mac HD, 16GB of internal RAM, 2.66GHz processor a new graphics card. I use iMovie HD 6 for all my editing. Since filming in HD I have experienced problems with editing though. The footage looks great, but the transitions are not fluid, almost every time I edit a scene together I experience a small flash or it doesn’t seamlessly mix together. It’s almost like a jump effect. I have to spend time either not adding a transition or just cutting from scene to scene. Sometimes the transitions look perfect, but most of the time I have problems. I think its because my hard drive either needs to be faster or an SSD. Any ideas? Alex Perdios Alan Stonebridge says… Thanks for the positive feedback about the magazine, Alex. Regarding your problem with iMovie’s transitions, do you mean they are faulty when you play back a project in iMovie itself? Does the problem occur when you export your project to a distribution format, such as one prepared for iPhone, iPad or Apple TV, and play that? What format does your HD camera record in? Also, what is the bit rate of the files it creates? If you’re not sure, your camera’s documentation might tell you, or you can try opening the file in QuickTime Player and choosing Window > Show Movie Inspector to find out. If you’re recording using a highend camera, you might find that the data rate is indeed too much for your storage to cope with, but consumer equipment like the iPhone, even though it records in HD, captures heavily compressed videos that should play fine from a 3.5-inch hard drive. It’s certainly an odd problem!