Does iMovie 11 support native AVCHD (.mts) files?

Hi, all.

I bought recently a SONY HDR-XR550VE camcorder with 1080i resolution. I wanted to work with iMovie in HD.

What was my surprise that when I imported videos in HD from the camcorder (verified that the clips was in HD 1080i playing these clips directly from the camera to the HD TV) the films are imported in iMovie '11 in standard definition!!. It was impossible to import in HD. I tried everything without results. The clips are imported in STD (standard definition).

I investigated a little bit in Google and the answer to import videos in HD to iMovie'11 from the SONY HDR-XR550VE is:

- Install Turbo.264 HD Video Converter from ELGATO (not very expensive).

- Import videos in 1080p to my Mac from the camera.

- Place the import clips in a local folder of my Mac.

- Rename the files and make them sort (f.e.: clip1.mov)

- Open iMovie and choose "Import from file"

- Select the desired files to import

- And.. thats it!.

With these steps I have HD1080p clips to work in iMovie '11

I hope this helps.

Regards.

First, I'd like to thank everyone who contributed to this discussion. Very informative. I've learned a lot.

I have both iMovie 11 and Final Cut Express, but for the type of amateur movies I create I like to use iMovie.

My questions are:

1. despite all the helpful info here, is there a book or other resource with a comprehensive guide to using AVCHD with iMovie?

2. I want to buy a new HD camcorder soon. I prefer Sony (over Canon) but would consider Panasonic also. Would anyone recommend a specific Sony (or Panasonic) camcorder for me to be able to import and edit HD video into iMovie WITHOUT using third party conversion software, etc?

3. What shooting format would you recommend to do 2. above? 720p? 1080p? Other?

Thanks!

Don't use 'Finalize Project'. Instead choose 'Media Browser...' from the Share menu. It does the same thing but lets you choose 720p, 1080p, etc. 🙂 (720p will cut down your export time by about half)

to 2)

I recently purchased the Panasonic Lumix ZS7, and I've been almost 100% satisfied so far. All-metal body and seems very high quality (most Panasonic products are- in fact in electronics quality of construction I rate Panasonic just below Apple 😉). I spent about four months researching various brands and all such nuances and finally chose this one. The price is rather high for a point-and-shoot but it's worth it- check out the features on the website (the ZS10 is this year's model of the same). It shoots in AVCHD and I've never had /any/ trouble using it with iMovie. About 1:2 import time and then it's saved as a 720p .mov file in my iMovie Events folder, plus I can edit it, etc.

to 3)

The ZS7 only does 720p (or lesser), and so far it's been great- the new ZS10 has a touchscreen, 16x zoom, and 1080p shooting. I would recommend trying both the 1080p and the 720p and seeing if the higher quality is noticeable enough to be worth the much longer import/export time, and the much greater file size.

to 1)

If so, I've never heard of such. The three things I've found most important are:

one- iMovie '11 can not edit or use AVCHD footage natively- it converts it to Quicktime to do anything with it;

two- iMovie '11 is by far the best way to convert AVCHD to Quicktime on a Mac, it's free and it does it quickly and in a nice interface;

three- The only advantage keeping any video in AVCHD over Quicktime that I've found is it takes up about half the storage space. In my opinion, If you're going to be shooting a lot of HD video anyway go get a couple 2TB drives and use Quicktime- it's much versatile and easier to share anyway.

Hope that helps!

Liam

Matt,

How do you make an exact copy of your camcorder disk using disk utility? I have a new canon g10 and I need to dump footage from it to an archive where I can use it later. I need the archive as a safety measure.

I'm not sure about using Disk Utility, but you can do it in iMovie. Open up the import screen (apple+i) and there's a button there to export your camera archive. It basically just saves everything into a folder that (somehow) is recognized as a camera archive by iMovie.

What I do now is use a program called RevolverHD by Shedworx: http://www.shedworx.com/revolverhdmac

I saw VoltaicHD mentioned, but I think RevolverHD program is better suited to this thread. It allows you to take the raw MTS files and create a "Camera Archive" that is recognized by iMovie. So now I just save the MTS files to DVD and when I need them again I just rebuild the archive using RevolverHD. Although not really ideal, I found this is good enough for me.

Agreed - WAY too much hard drive space. What is the best way for me to import, edit and then export my AVCHD .mts (Canon HF 21) files while a) not taking up ~60GB/hr, and b) retaining the highest quality video?

FCE? iMovie 11? Or something else?

Although this won't get around the storage/duplication issues, here is a free solution to AVCHD conversion on *nix type systems (Mac included):

http://code.google.com/p/hdffxvrt/ <- Browse code (trunk).

The script here might need tweeking for frame-rate etc., there are various versions of this script hanging around the interweb (google). There a useful write-up here:

http://dropsafe.crypticide.com/article/2657

Hope this helps somebody.

Cheers

Rich

P.S. If you're missing any software (i.e. ffmpeg) while take a look a HomeBrew, MacPorts or Fink?

You better get yourself a large external hard drive - having only 30 GB on your hard drive is approaching the minimum required for the OS to run properly (10 - 15% of your total hard drive space needs to be free and available at all times). You cannot add any more movies to your hard drive or you are inviting all sorts of unwanted behavior.

So, you could "park" your movie clips/projects on an external hard drive until you're ready to process them. However, while processing, a small 30 minute project can swell to 50 - 60 GB depending on the special effects you use, whether it's 720p or 1080p, etc, etc.

Quite often, I run my 1080p footage through MPEG Streamclip (free) to convert it to 720p; I have found that I cannot tell the difference between the two on my HDTV, so I make the movies 720p - saves a lot of space on your hard drive!

Not sure why I did not think of connceting the camera directly to iMovie, thank you Karsten!

I've been reading this thread with interest as I want to edit AVCHD movies when my MBP arrives. I've been using Sony Vegas Studio 9 on the PC but it is so slow to render. I was hoping iMovie was going to be much quicker but to my great disappointment it can't even work with full HD and converts everything. Very disappointing. And what's even worse is that you can't access video files from your hard drive. I can't import it from my camera as I deleted a lot of my footage months/years ago.

I can only think the reason it doesn't support AVCHD is so that they can make money selling final cut, as iMovie is free. And typically of Apple Final cut is overpriced compared to windows equivalents :/

One workaround is to use mediaconverter to re-wrap the .mts files to .mov (re-wrap, NOT transcode). http://media-converter.sourceforge.net/ .Then, this can be imported into imovie.