Slow-motion sound, choppy video when converting 8mm in iMovie
 

Hi!

I am currently trying to digitize some old 8mm films. I currently have a Sony Handycam which has a firewire output which I connect to my Macbook Pro. The schematic looks like:

Sony Handycam --> 4 pin firewire to 8 pin firewire --> Apple firewire to thunderbolt adapter --> iMovie.

In iMovie, I click on the "Import" button to which iMovie then detects the Sony Handycam. However, when I try to import to run the video on iMovie, it is very choppy, the audio feed sounds like I am playing video in slow motion. Additionally, the video "blinks" every few seconds. After the video is done importing, I noticed that iMovie split up a supposedly continuous video into many parts of a couple seconds each. Is this somehow related to "fps" settings or something? I cannot figure out what is going on but would greatly appreciate any advice! thanks!

I had the same problem, only in my case, not even the a single clip showed up in my project.

But a simple workaround: use Quicktime 7, which imports from Firewire just fine. You con't get the fine grained control of the camera, but you can still get the video and do some minimal editing on it, and then import into iMove if you want.