My Trout Unlimited Chapter 501(c)(3) organization is trying to put together an instructional video on how to tie some complicated flys for our members. Our Camera supports only .AVI file format but when we attempt to load these into iMovie, we get an error message (?). Any suggestions?
The videos are normally about two hours and must have audio as well as video. Any ideas?
Kindest Regards.
AVI is an old format even in the PC world, and I don't think iMovie has ever accepted it
iMovie should be okay with .mp4 format, although it may be called .m4v
Now we start getting down into the nitty gritty of video format. If you are lucky your video element is encoded with h264 codec. If you are really lucky your audio is encoded as aac = mp4-audio. You can use a video editing too such as Subler to repackage them into a .mp4 package which will make iMovie happy. Unfortunately some AVI packaged videos used .mp3 for audio which .mp4 packaging won't accept. Then you're faced with transcoding the audio audio.
I am going to pause now because if all this goes over your head so far it's only going to get worse. :-)
AVI is an old format even in the PC world, and I don't think iMovie has ever accepted it
iMovie should be okay with .mp4 format, although it may be called .m4v
Now we start getting down into the nitty gritty of video format. If you are lucky your video element is encoded with h264 codec. If you are really lucky your audio is encoded as aac = mp4-audio. You can use a video editing too such as Subler to repackage them into a .mp4 package which will make iMovie happy. Unfortunately some AVI packaged videos used .mp3 for audio which .mp4 packaging won't accept. Then you're faced with transcoding the audio audio.
I am going to pause now because if all this goes over your head so far it's only going to get worse. :-)
As Limnos says, the .avi format is a legacy format that is no longer supported by iMovie. But not to worry. It is a problem that is easily solved. You just need to convert your .avi footage to Mp4/AAC that iMovie supports. That is easily done with the free download, Handbrake, that will do it by default.
You can get Handbrake here:
A simple way to do it is to put your .avi footage on your desktop. Then open Handbrake and do a File/Open Source. A window will pop up where you can navigate to your video on the desktop and choose it as the source. Then do File/Start Encoding. Wait a couple of minutes for the conversion to complete. Then save and import the converted clip into iMovie.
-- Rich
iMovie supported file formats
