iMovie taking hours to generate thumbnails

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Please help!

I have a MacBook Pro and OS X 10.5.1. I am running iMovie '08, it came with my computer, which I bought less than 2 months ago.

I've got some video on my hard drive, in .mp4 format, that i would like to edit in iMovie. But whenever I import a file, it takes a long long time to get past the 'generating thumbnails' stage. For instance I just told it to import a clip which is approximately 8 minutes long, and it has been working on the thumbnails for nearly 30 minutes and the dialog box indicates that there are another 25 minutes to go. I could draw the thumbnails by hand faster than this.

Exporting also takes forever -- to export a 3-minute clip in .mp4 format took at least half an hour. I don't know if these are related problems or what.

Needless to say I don't want to try importing any more video until I can figure this out. Is there a setting I need to change to make it do "fast thumbnails" or is my version of iMovie just bad? Is it possible to tell the program to NOT make thumbnails at all? I looked online but I didn't find this problem discussed (unlike some other problems I've had that are common enough to show up in forums like this one) so I fear that it's unique to my system.

Any help is dearly appreciated. Thanks!!!

-shondra_c
 

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