Video on my camera shows in Photos but not in iMovie on your Mac

asdfdouglas Said:

"Jeez Apple: This is pathetic. Take a 30 second video on your camera and it shows in Photos but not in iMovie on your Mac? And if you go into Photos and try to "Edit with iMovie" you get an error message that iMovie can't open the .mov file? Seriously, iMovie should see the clip and download it from iCloud. What is this, an attempt to force me to edit on iOS???"

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Provide your Opinions to Apple:

Do your Part: If you want, you can provide Apple feedback. But be positive, or they will just blow it off, based off of keywords received. So, give them feedback. Apple won't get back to you directly, but the more feedback they receive on something, the more they will know what suits their customers' needs and what to consider in time to come.

How to Give Feedback:

1. Go Here: Feedback - iMovie - Apple
2. Select: "Performance" for the "Feedback Type"
3. Proceed from there as necessary

I'm an iMovie user like yourself, so not speaking for Apple here.

When you get a message that iMovie cannot open the .mov file, that means that there is some codec in the .mov bucket rendered by your camera that is incompatible with iMovie. There is nothing "pathetic" about that. If you want to use iMovie it is your responsibility to record in a compatible format or convert the .mov clip to Mp4/AAC or other format that iMovie likes. Photos is a different application, so just because the .mov file may play there doesn't mean that it will work in iMovie that needs to unpack it for editing. I have found that iMovie can be more sensitive to codec variations than other Apple apps. For example, not all Mp4 formats play in iMovie. It must be Mp4/AAC.

You may want to try converting your .mov clip to H.264, Mp4/AAC with the free download, Handbrake. Do that even if the codec already is indicated to be Mp4/AAC. Re-rendering often cures the issue.

You can get Handbrake here:

https://handbrake.fr/

A simple way to do it is to open Handbrake and do a File/Open Source. Navigate to your video and choose it as the source from the resulting screen. Then do File/Start Encoding. Wait a couple of minutes for the conversion to complete. Then save and import the converted clip into iMovie.

Or sometimes you can cure the incompatibility by Control-clicking on the clip on your desktop and selecting Encode Selected Video Files from the drop down menu. That will render a M4v file that should work in iMovie.

-- Rich

Points well taken. You mentioned "camera" so I wasn't thinking of an iPhone, since all of my iPhone videos play fine in iMovie.

Try recording without HDR or HEVC (if you are using those formats) on your iPhone settings and see if that makes a difference. Also, try exporting from the Photos app to your desktop and from there dragging into iMovie. The "edit in iMovie" feature in Photos may not be working correctly.

Another thing that you can try is deleting preferences by opening iMovie while holding down the Option and Command keys and selecting to delete preferences.

If you are using High Sierra as your profile suggests, you might try updating or upgrading that to see if it makes a difference. Some times mixing older and newer versions of interacting apps can cause problems.

-- Rich

Yeah, I see. I don't blame you.

I'm not sure what the default settings are for new iPhones. Can they be changed? As a test, have you tried re-rendering a clip per my suggestion in a previous response? That way you can see if it is a format issue.

-- Rich

I'll be curious to see if we get other reports of this on this forum. If so, it probably is something that Apple will need to address, as you originally thought. At least you have a workaround, albeit somewhat inconvenient.

Best,

-- Rich

asdfdouglas Said:

"Jeez Apple: Thank you for the pointer, polite feedback has been submitted. :-)"

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You are welcome. Well done on your part too. Your feedback will help many, for certain.