s there a list of what formats iMovie is compatible with and what formats it can not handle (mpg no, mpg4 no, avi no, wmv no, vob no, etc.)
DV, AIC, M-JPEG, Photo-JPEG, MPEG-4, and H.264 files are iMovie '08 compatible. With regard to MPEG-4, if you are using proprietary codecs (e.g., Microsoft, 3ivX, etc.) have incompatible audio (e.g., DVI ADPCM), or extraneous tracks (like "Tween" tracks), then they would not be compatible with iMovie '08. As we keep reminding people here, it is what is inside the file container that determines what is and what is not compatible with iMovie '08. For some reason many people seem to think that a movie is a movie is a movie and probably believe a beta tape should be able to be played on a VHS tape machine.
Is there some special camera that is needed to record movies that iMovie will recognize?
Only if you don't want to manually convert the files. For instance, some of Casio digital cameras use M-JPEG/DVI ADPCM AVI content which is not compatible with iMovie '08 because of the adaptive PCM audio. However, some of their cameras also use M-JPEG/Unsigned Integer compressed content which is compatible with iMovie '08 in its original AVI container.
I guess I need to get a third party program again to have my files work with my new MacBook Pro.
iMovie HD or GaragBand will convert most files (excluding "muxed" compression formats) that will play in QT or for which you have the proper QT decoder component installed. For muxed files you can use any MPEG-base, third-party converted like iSquint (free), MPEG Streamclip (free but requires $20 MPEG-2 component for MPEG-2 content), FFmpegX (donation-ware), Visual Hub (pay-ware), etc.