iMovie MacOS 12.1 Monterey cannot import project from iOS

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iMovie MacOS 12.1 Monterey cannot import project from iOS

When I try to import a project that was created on my iPhone Pro Max 13 to my M1 Macbook Pro laptop running MacOs 12.1 I get the error "Error in iOS Project Import. Failed to import the selected iOS project file. Please try again."

So a few points:

Please try again is a very silly request. I am pretty sure if I kept trying again I would get the same results as a "Homer Simpson" problem solver.
Apple wrote both products. Could Apple be a little bit more specific as to what the issue is exactly other than "please try again". There must be some error code with greater meaning somewhere internally. So then this makes me wonder why the developers are not displaying this information. There is a gotcha somewhere that Apple marketing doesn't want you to see.
I read the link below and it's not really helpful and cannot possibly be true because... see the next point
If you rename the file from .iMovieMobile to .zip and then you import all of the assets into iMovie, everything works PERFECTLY FINE. So this is NOT an audio/video codec issue. It's clearly something else.

What am I missing here?

Also, I thought iCloud was supposed to make sharing assets between Apple devices a breeze. I had to read several articles before I clued in that iMovie for Mac is NOT iMovie for iPad or iPhone. Same name, same company but different behaviours that result in very frustrating usability issues. I fully understand that iMovie for iPad should be a subset of iMovie for Mac. But it is not even that. They behave differently on a number of fronts and this is quite baffling in 2022. And given that my M1 iPad Pro with 16Gb of RAM has incredible horsepower, why? Older iPads, I get it. But why not allow those of us with modern hardware do modern things and disable features on older iPads or simply you need to accept that they just run very slowly.

iMovie won't import iOS movie project - Apple Community

EJK

MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 12.1

Posted on Apr 16, 2022 8:50 AM

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Answer 1

Rich839

Level 8

47,688 points

Apr 16, 2022 10:06 AM in response to ejkitchen

As stated at the bottom of this screen, this forum is where Apple customers help each other. We do not speak for Apple. To give feedback to Apple, click on this link:

Product Feedback - Apple

You are correct that Mac iMovie is a different app than iOS iMovie. This forum is for iMovie for Mac. Other users have expressed confusion with the nomenclature, so you are not alone. since you have iMovie on your Mac, that would be the place to be doing iMovie projects rather than your phone. It has more capability that iOS Mac. I look upon the iPhone app as more of a standalone convenience.

For quite some time there have been problems importing iOS projects into Mac iMovie, as the 2017 link that you posted indicates. My iPhone used to successfully import iOS iMovie projects easily into Mac iMovie projects, but then suddenly stopped doing so. There could be other reasons for that other than a bug, but I suspect that a bug or some other incompatibility may be at the bottom of it. I can't attribute my case to upgrades to my system because for quite awhile I have been running Mojave with iMovie 10.1.12, and using iPhone 6s, and the iOS project imports worked fine. (Yeah, I know. I'm out of date. I just have too many 32 bit apps that I still use and not have taken the trouble to create a separate boot disk.)

Until Apple fixes the issue the workaround would be to export a standalone movie out of the iPhone, and then import the standalone into Mac iMovie. Embedded edits couldn't easily be re-edited, but you still can do quite a lot -- splitting, adding clips, adding titles, deleting clip segments, adding effects, substituting music, and so on.

-- Rich

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iMovie MacOS 12.1 Monterey cannot import project from iOS

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