Does iMovie '11 support 1080-60p?

Someone should start a wikipedia page on HD and iMovie. There is a big need to summarize info about the various HD formats (resolutions, frame rates, i or p, native, etc.), Codecs, and work arounds to use HD and iMovie.

I totally agree with "Starter". We need a throrough explanation from Apple with regard to iMovie and how it relates to all these different HD and standard formats - frankly, they are doing my head in. I've got a little Panny that will only record in the American NTSC format - i.e. at a frame rate of 60i and 30p, rather than our European PAL format, which has a frame rate of 50 and 25 respectively. Meaning, if I want to put the contents onto a DVD the film quality degrades. Substantially. Also, iMovie 11 itself does not want to convert the original NTSC footage into PAL like iMovie 6 and iMovie HD used to do. And I found that importing my clips into iMovie HD (which is set in Preferences to PAL) gives much better results than importing the same clips into iMovie 11 without any conversion. What gives? I don't understand this at all.

Martina22 wrote:

... We need a throrough explanation from Apple with regard to iMovie and how it relates to all these different HD and standard formats ..

Apple will not do that.

They are very 'shy' to confuse the average customer with all that engineers lingo.

therefor the list of 'supported' devices. that simple. that's it.

to make things even more simple:

iMovies import routines are only triggered with AVCHD1 conform media.

50/60p, any streams beyond 24Mbit/s are not within that specs, that is AVCHD2, as for my dream-machine GCPX10 < sigh >, which goes to 34Mbit/s for 1080/50p .......

when you simply un-wrap the 60p.mts with the free ReWrap2M4V scipt - presto! - iM supports the resulting 60p.mov ....

the lege arte way is, to use the $$ ClipWrap tool to convert into appleintermediate.mov

that simple.

and: NOTHING replaces a high frame rate for SLOWMO ... see my lil' test with FCPX here http://youtu.be/xG0p4XxsR3s?hd=1

but to create a SMOOTH IMPRESSION, you need much more than just frame-rate and/or interlaced/progressive ... that is photographers work, by using profound the shutter speed ... watch any Transformers movie: every frame blurred' .... 😉

Thanks for that, Karsten. Strangely, I have found that I get reasonable results (for DVD-burning purposes anyway) by going back to iMovie HD - importing the clips as DV PAL (as set in Preferences) and exporting in full DV/Quicktime quality. I've also set my Panasonic to iFrame (a 960x540 30fps setting within my Panny, designed to work smoothly with iMovie when importing). It's a bit odd that when I import my clips in their native format, i.e. MP4, they always show up darker and more contrasty in iMovie (HD as well as 11) than importing them as DV PAL. Not sure why that is, but it's a bit annoying that I actually have to use an old version of iMovie to get better results. I don't really need HD as that's a bit pointless with standard DVDs - burning HD "home-made" films to DVD is a joyless task as the quality from what I've seen isn't that brilliant.

Hallo to everyone, i'm italian and excuse me for any errors 🙂

Who says iMovie '09 or '11 don't handle 50p/60p footage? I don't have a panasonic, i have a canon HF10 and footage is 50i. When import at original size in iMovie the clip is still interlaced, you can see if play with quicktime 7 because quicktime X deinterlace automatically. Due to eliminate some bad artifacts with imovie effects or stabilization or quality degrading output, i deinterlace imovie clips with jes deinterlacer using Prores codec (usually 422 or 422HQ - yes imovie handles perfectly prores clips) 50p output at 1920x1080. Now i copy clips 50p into imovie events subfolder. When start imovie i found clips ready to use. Now the event still 25p/30p when output, but slowmotion is great, and quality is very better.

I hope my oldscool english is decent or at least comprensible.

Simone.