iMovie 11 Projects Have to Be 30fps?

Yes, the inspector will display the credentials of your produced movie correctly.

What I am saying is that iMovie can work with all sorts of movie formats - Mix up PAL and NTSC, HD and Standard Def and you can edit a movie together. When you ask it to export to Quicktime, and specify the Frame Size, and Frame Rate etc, it will do just that. It will create whatever you ask for, even if that means enlarging the picture and doubling up the frame rate. The quality will be reduced, but that is what you asked for .........

iMovie (and Quicktime generally) have an amazing array of Export options - You can pretty much ask for whatever you want in terms of codec, size, interlaced, progressive and frame rate. What we are trying to ensure is as little conversion as possible. Maintaining the quality (resolution and frame rate) throughout the capture, editing and export.

Previous versions of iMovie would only work with 25 or 30fps (being the two main standards). This would effectively remove every other frame of your Panasonic's 60p footage. You could still edit this and export at 60fps, but it won't recreate those original frames, it will double up from those that remain.

You need to ensure that your captured footage in iMovie is imported at 60fps - Thats the key. As to the 59.86, you need someone better than me, but its to do with the fact that NTSC standard is not exactly 60fps - It is fractionally less.

Sorry, in iMovie 09 it is actually in the 'View' menu - Playhead Info. This will allow you to gently move the arrow / playhead through your clip and see the seconds and frames counting up and down. It will certainly establish whether there are 30 or 60 frames in every second of video.

With the 59.86, as I say, you need someone better than me. It wouldn't surprise me if iMovie imported your 59.97 footage, halved the frame rate to make it progressive '30'ish fps and then doubled it inaccurately creating the slight error

Yep based on my tests the 60 FPS footage you shot and the 60 FPS footage that comes out of iMovie will NOT be the same.

Once the project tags it as 30 FPS you are out of luck. If it really was editing and using the 60 FPS correctly exporting out to QT at the "current" frame rate would result in a 60 FPS file. It does not.

I can confirm iMovie works with 50/60fps movies, with the weird caveat of not getting a correct 50/60fps on the export, regardless of target container (tried both m4v and Quicktime).
This quirk existed in the iMovie '09 version as well for me (used the exact same input movies).

My workflow looks like this:
1a. Transcode my mts clips from my AVCHD camera (Panasonic SD600) shot in both 50i and 50p using Toast 10 and into ProRes HQ (which is not transcoded any further and very editable in iMovie).
1b. Re-wrap using the Rewrap2M4V script (also tried VoltaicHD and ClipWrap). This way it is actually possible to have h.264 editing capabilities via a Quicktime container in iMovie.
2. Create via Finder an Event folder and place the clips inside (all versions)
3. Start iMovie which will add the events and generate thumbnails and cache
4. Either edit the plist (works for both '09 and '11 however the easiest is just to have two dummy projects, one set to 25fps and the other to 50fps (or the equivalents) and just duplicate to a new project. The fps setting is per project, which is just an xml file, so you can also edit the project file directly if you want.
5. iMovie will tag all 50fps clips in the event browser. It will also warn if you try to mix clips with differing fps.
6. Export using Quicktime to almost 50/60fps ... This is a strange result indeed. Event typing exact number still produce the same results.

Too bad the timeline is not stored as a reference movie as one could have grabbed that and sent it to a more configurable encoder :/


edit: And to clarify I'm getting a fps of 49.95. Some players identify it as a 50fps clip...
BTW the 59.86 is twice the fps for NTSC at 29.93

Message was edited by: mattias.rylander

1a. Only possible if you have a Pro app installed. (BTW HQ is overkill for this media.)

BTW the 59.86 is twice the fps for NTSC at 29.93

There is no NTSC frame rate that is 29.93. It's always 29.97. Video shot at film frame rates is 23.976.

Yes, I too am getting the 49.95 frame rate export from iM 09

I follow an almost identical workflow with rewrap2m4v and I have my iM09 set for 50fps as I only ever use that application to test SD600 1080p footage. Hadn't occurred to me that the 49.95 frame rate was the same problem that the thread originator was having.

For the moment I'll stick with my rewrapped m4v files into iM06 and edit at 25fps. Seems a shame though as I was hoping to put 720p50 onto an AVCHD DVD which I think would work.

Yes of course! Bad things happen when I try to think late at night.

Actually I found out you get 50FPS when exporting a project reverted to 25fps just right before exporting (via editing the project settings file). So I'm going to try that out a bit more.
My footage is in 1080p50 which is a bit off spec but 720p50 is more common I think.

Anyway, my primary usage is really to be able to do a rough cut in iMovie and then export it via xml which incidentally works great. The benefit of doing this is that you get a pretty good organizer in iMovie and that it is pretty darn easy.

Where are you going with the XML?

The rough cuts are exported to FCP for professional production, obviously not done by me 😉

You really don't want to do this in iMovie. I know it seems like a good idea, but your media's going to be in the Apple Intermediate Codec, which is old and has a limited color space. Anything else that has to be done to the media downstream is going to be adversely affected by this.

Yes I know, but the clips are converted prior to importing them into iMovie as I described earlier.
And since FCP can't import 1080p50 clips directly from the camera, thus forcing me to rewrap them in Quicktime, this workflow is easier for me.