Having fallen in love with Sony's latest HD Handycam, the SR11, I too was hesitant to purchase, based on the overwhelming amount of doubts and consternation I have been reading here and elsewhere on the web regarding compatibility with iMovie '08. Let me be the first to put your fears to rest:
*YES, THE SONY HDR-SR11 IS FULLY COMPATIBLE WITH iMovie '08 ON AN INTEL MAC!*
Cue the Halleluja chorus, let loose the fireworks!
Not wanting to subject myself to a 15% re-stocking fee to find out what Apple has thus far failed to post in their camcorder compatibility white paper, I persuaded one very helpful young man at my local Best Buy to unlock their floor model and hook it up to one of the Macs in their newly-installed Mac retail display. What we discovered during that exercise clinched the deal for me, and I left the store with a brand spanking new SR11.
Here's the deal: I'm running a 24" aluminum iMac (1.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 2GB of RAM and OS X 10.5.2) with iMovie '08 version 7.1.1. When I plug the SR11 into one of the USB ports on the keyboard (stands to reason any USB port will work), and activate the "HD USB Connect" Option via the camera's instructions, it mounts on the desktop as "No Name". If you're the adventurous type who likes to dig around in the file structure of these devices, there's your chance. But you needn't bother.
With the camera connected and mounted on the desktop, I launched iMovie '08 and was greeted (very briefly) by a "New Camera Discovered" popup. It flashed so fast that I didn't have time to see what it said, but was immediately replaced with the Import From Camera Dialogue. I could see there as well that the Camera shows up as "No Name" in the list of devices.
All of the HD clips I had shot thus far were nicely arranged in a thumbnail panel at the bottom of the dialogue, where I was able to select and individually preview all of the content before importing it.
I pulled one clip (1 min, 15 sec) into a new event, and it transfered pretty much at 1:1 speed. It may have taken a few seconds longer than the actual clip duration to create the timeline thumbnails, but there it was, in all its full 1290 x 1080 glory, ready for editing.
One last word on the import: iMovie transcodes the content to Apple Intermediate Codec (which, at 865MB for that 1.25 minute clip, I'm guessing is uncompressed), and muxes the Dolby 5.1 surround (if you were capturing it) down to stereo. I'll be looking for ways around that one issue in the weeks to come, but for now, consider this a successful test of the Sony HDR-SR11 with iMovie '08.
