iMovie not recognizing Canon HF S20 or AVCHD files

I have the same Canon Vixa HFS20 camera and the same problem with the i-life 11/i-movie not "seeing" my camera on a brand new i mac bought last week even though our camera is listed on mac's approved site to do so. I brought the camera into work today to try on my slightly older imac running the older 09 i life. It did not work as well right away so i kept trying a few things. I finally tried putting the HFS20's main HD clips on the cameras screen instead of trying to pull video off the two A & B SD cards clips and re pluged in the USB and wal-ah the mac now sees the clips and showed them on the screen as thumbnails ready for import. So that may have been the problem? Camera must be on its main 32G hd and not the SD cards info so i movie see's all the clips? Now will it work that way back at home using the i life 11 i movie, thats the question...TBC

If you have all the info off your SDHC cards, I would recommend that you reformat (or reinitialize) the cards using the menu on your camera. I find that I have to do this reformat about every five imports, so I am in the habit of doing it after every import rather than erasing the card.

I have a Panasonic HMC-40 and iMovie does not see it via the USB cable BUT if iMovie is on and I plug in the SD card on a reader it prompts for import. If iMovie is not on and the SD card was copied in full (meaning I make a folder and copy 100% of the contents) iMovie will read this as an "archive". I just navigate to the top level folder of the SD card (NOT THE ACTAUL FILES) and import.



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Daniel C. Slagle
Keeper of the "Unofficial" iMovie FAQ I may receive some form of compensation, financial or otherwise, from my recommendation or link

I am using the canon hfs20 camera and imovie 8. It imported video clips from the SD card in the camera into imovie. when i took some videos and stored them on the camera's internal memory, imovie wouldn't recognize them. i even tried to copy everything from the internal memory to the SD card. imovie still wouldn't recognize it.

Why does imovie not read the internal memory but does read the SD card?

if i copy the video files (.MTS) to the computer, imovie won't recognize them because they are MTS files.

Does anybody know a way around this?

PROBLEM SOLVED.

i really feel great about solving this recognition problem between my Canon hfs20 and imovie.

This may be the same issue for others.

i talked to Rodney at Canon support and he resolved it.

the reason imovie wouldn't recognize my video files is because 2 of them had been corrupted.

the way to find these was to view the thumbnails on the camera.

there were two thumbnails that didn't show a picture but showed a large question mark.

these were corrupted.

after deleting these two thumbnails, imovie recognized the camera and imported the videos.

i hope this helps others.

I had the same problem with my Canon Vixia HF200. After reading your post, I realized I had a corrupt file on the camcorder (big question mark) so deleted it. I then also realized that the camera was set on "photo" (the dial on the right side of the camera) instead of "movie". That's why iPhoto kept popping up when I plugged in! Operator error! Thanks for helping me solve my problem!!