What is the best format for graphics when importing to iMovie?

Hi,

Your choices in iMovie are JPEG, PNG, PDF, and TIFF. As to which works best, it would be a matter of your personal preference. To my eye, there is no significant difference between them. TIFF gives an image the highest resolution from a technical standpoint, but results in a much higher file size. You might want to create a new iMovie project and import your graphic files into it using each of the above formats and see which looks best. Share out the project and do your evaluation from the shared out Movie. It is hard to judge quality from the iMovie project preview screen that is a moderate resolution display for editing purposes. When you share out, choose Better Quality Compression. For best quality, choose Best Quality (pro res) format, although that produces a 4x movie file size. You may or may not think that the quality difference between High Quality ( an Mp4 file) versus Best Quality (pro res), a .mov file, is significant.

I am surprised that the JPEG format produced a fuzzy graphic. I have not experienced that. Could it possibly have anything to do with the settings in your graphics program?

-- Rich

Another way to think about doing the project:

Use Keynote; place jpegs or whatever kind of image on slides in Keynote, use the Play>Record slideshow function to create a raw video [movie] file, then import into iMovie to do your more precise editing.

A 1080p Keynote recording of any image type on its slides appears spectacular on my 55" 4K monitor. Not remotely blurry. I can record my audio+video easily, make mistakes, pause and then go-on or -over and edit out the unwanted easily in iMovie.

Just a further wrinkle on this approach:

I have worked in Powerpoint for quite a while, and I find it allows me a great deal of flexibility and power in preparing graphics [on a slide.] I often bring a photograph or strictly graphic image into Powerpoint onto a slide, and then edit it heavily - arrows, text, animations, transitions, etc etc. I do this in Powerpoint because I have become familiar with it - much more so than Keynote.

I find Keynote's architecture rather baffling, right down to what menu-options and buttons are labeled. Very unintuitive to me compared to Powerpoint [which I taught myself by doing.]

Both Keynote and Powerpoint allow one to record a slideshow of {slides plus audio}, and both will export at 1080p which is good for my work [photography, so detail is important. Empirically, I have found 4k is unnecessary for me.]

BUT… and this is a BIG BUT, using the Mac version of Powerpoint you you cannot export the audio track of a recorded slideshow. …Riddle me that…

So, I mostly [90%] create my slides in Powerpoint, and then I import them into Keynote which is 'almost' seamless.: drag & drop, immeidately save into .key format. Sometimes I find a few changes/distortions introduced by the transfer, which I have quickly learned how to edit in Keynote, and sometimes I make a few tweaks simply because I have new idea after looking at the slides anew.

Then I record the slideshow+audio in Keynote, export it as a movie @ 1080p, import that into my iMovie project and do my editing and rendering/creation of the final movie as a .mp4 movie.

The workflow in actuality is much easier and smoother than it sounds in this description, and I consistently get excellent visual product with very clear audio. [The audio level in even short clips can in iMovie pretty easily be modified.]

Hope that helps lower the barrier to your at least trying this approach. For me, being able to quickly go back and tweak a graphic [slide] in Keynote [or if necessary Powerpoint] is for me a huge advantage. I find that I get improved ideas about how visually to present my instruction during and after reviewing my movies so I want an easy path to revisions of the graphics. Also, re-recording a short clip and inserting it in the body of a 'lecture' is very easy in iMovie.

fusodrvr,

Yes, I have begun using Keynote to create animated titles to use in iMovie. I've not used it specifically for graphics. So far it works great for titles. I agree with your comments in your subsequent post that Keynote can be unintuitive. However, the Help menu is good. I take a screen shot of the Help menu instructions to use side by side while working with the program.

-- Rich

Rich839

Thanks for the tip on screenshots of the Help menu. I had not thought of that.

So far, I have imported graphic images and photos into both Powerpoint and Keynote

•directly from a camera,

•from Photoshop as .jpg and .tif files,

•as well as copied content off the screen in Photoshop [copy and copy merged (multiple layers)]

as the basis for a slide, and then edited ["created"] further in Powerpoint or Keynote [depending on where I am in the workflow and whether I can easily figure out how to do an edit/creation in Keynote or I have to go back to Powerpoint to get it done]. I'm still working in Office 2011 [again, due to familiarity] tho I will have to transition forward soon I think.

iMovie will not drop the resolution of what is imported into it.

-- Rich