iMovie export problem [View all]

Hi

I am doing a favor for a friend, taking video off mini DV videotapes and putting them on a hard drive for him. I hooked up the DV cam via firewire and it pulled the video into iMovie flawlessly, the tape is about 58 min long. The problem is, when I went to export from iMovie to mp4, the progress bar popped up and said initially that it would take 7 hours, then I checked back later and it said 9 hours, it just seems to stall out trying to process an hour's worth of video.

The machine is a Powermac G5 professional tower with dual 2.3 ghz processors and 6gb RAM so I know if the machine is operating normally, processing power is not a factor. I've looked at everything I can think of and can't find a thing wrong with the machine, I'm stumped as to why it's doing this.

edited to add: OS is OSX Leopard 10.5.8, iMovie version is i Movie '09

If anybody knows, I'd appreciate the help.

Thanks