Robert Roaldi

I can only describe what I see happen and I won't try to use video jargon since I don't really know it well enough. My camcorder (HF200) can record at 30p or 60i settings, but the manual refers to its 60i as television mode (??) as opposed to 30p, which it calls progressive. I shot the same scene using both settings. The scene took about 20 or 21 seconds to shoot. If I process the "60i" version directly in iMovie by importing in the normal way, I end up with a 20-second clip. I don't know whether iMovie uses the two interlaced fields to make up a frame or if it drops one, I simply don't know its inner workings. (To confuse matters, when you use the 30p setting, it still stores those frames in a "60i wrapper". I read about this in a DVXuser thread once, but I lost the link. It's referred to that way in the Canon manual. Sounds like it's a way to use a common file storage layout, but that's just a guess.) So what Avidemux seems to do is to turn each of those interlaced fields into a separate frame, which means it doubles the number of final frames in my clip, which doubles its length, i.e., to about 40 seconds. So now I seem to have a 30p clip that is twice as long as the original filming, which when imported into iMovie is a slo-mo version of the original. I hope I haven't confused things further.

Hi Oskar, Downloaded and tried it, and it seemed to work, i.e., it doubled the number of frames/length of clip. I need to read thru the Wiki and teach myself what all those options mean, but that's my problem. I think I'm on the right track now, thanks Oskar and everyone else.

Thanks, will try it tonight.

No, I do not have easy access to a Windows machine. Maybe for a one-shot but was hoping to find a longer-term MAC solution. I downladed JES, Handbrake and Streamclip to test, but I was not able to transcode/convert (correct term?) 60i to 60p, although I could have easily misunderstood their usage. I'll keep looking and if I find something useful, I'll add to here. Thanks again, everybody.