what file types does imovie actually import?

What problems have you had with AVI files??

I have problems with MPEG files-I can't get the audio to play in iMovieHD. (separate thread on that question posted)

Laura.

Although iMovie08 expands the kinds of file types it can work with, iMovieHD and prior versions preferred video files to be DV Stream (.dv) -- the kind of files that are created when importing from a miniDV camcorder. This is a high-quality video format.

There are a number of video file formats, and some are container formats (eg, .mov and .avi) that can contain a video that's been encoded using one of a variety of codecs. I'd suggest reading David Pogue's "Missing Manual" for an informative discussion of these topics and a much more complete list of file types. It will also talk about mpeg files (you'll need some more software to edit those).
John

I've looked everywhere for a complete list.

iMovieHD is part of the iLife suite and is intended to be a DV-editor, meant to work with miniDV camcorders..

so, Apple has no reason to publish a list of supported formats... ANY other formats than dv-stream (or iSight mpeg4s..), 48kHz aiff (miniDV) + aac (iTunes), jpeg (iPhoto) are beyond concept of this software ...

for sure, underlying Quicktime technology allows an 'on the fly' conversion of some other codecs, but e.g. a 'muxxed' codec as any mpeg, where audio and video are no seperated streams, creates an 'audio loss' ...

choose 'dv-stream' in your converter tools and iM is happy ... 😉

Hi

And just to add to Karstens excelent reply.

• mp3 - might work but are often reported as a problem maker

I always convert it to audio .aiff (48k or 16-bit) files before importing into iMovie

Yours Bengt W