Why does the video from my Samsung CL65 have black previews in iPhoto?

Have you tried rebuilding your iPhoto library?

I have not tried rebuilding my library. Why would a rebuild solve this problem? Previews of videos from other cameras work just fine and continue to work! It seems like something very specific to the video coming from this camera.

Then try opening one of the problematic clips in Quicktime and advance to any frame that isn’t blank. Then go to the “View” menu and select “Set Poster Frame” and save. Then drag the clip back to iPhoto and see if it has helped.

I am doing this in QuickTime Player, not QuickTime Pro and it does not have that menu item. What I have tried doing is trimming the first few frames off the movie and resaving it. Sometimes that workds and sometimes I get an error when I try to do it.

I just went in and looked at the folder where iPhoto is storing the movies and the previews of the movies work in the Finder, but not in iPhoto.

If you upgrade to Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and with that to Quicktime X, you’ll get some of the Pro features for free. The Snow Leopard upgrade is that same price as Quicktime Pro was previously, so it’s a good deal. :)

Not sure if it’ll do “Set Poster Frame” though.