Good news: iMovie'11 supports 60p (720p60 and 1080p60)

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jerome1989 Author

Level 2

257 points

Good news: iMovie'11 supports 60p (720p60 and 1080p60)

Hi.

Here is a (very nice to me!) surprise, a feature that appeared in iMovie'11 and does not seem to be documented by Apple.

I have 2 cameras that shoos at 60 frames per second (a Xacti HD2000, able to shoot 1080p60, and now also a GoPro Hero HD, able to shoot 1080p30 or 720p60)

Up to iMovie'09, I had to mess with the project files in order to be able to output 60fps movies.It worked, but was painful

Now having a quite powerful Mac, I always shoot at 720p60 or 1080p60, but never tried to output at 60p in iMovie'11.

I just tried and ... ity workds : beautiful 720p60 output!

(this is really 60p: opening the movie in Quicktime Player, pressing the right arrow always changes the image, and the time counter requires 60 right arrow presses in order to add 1 second).

So, here is what you have to do if you want to export a 60p movie made with your 60p footage :

- create a NTSC (29.97 fps) project in iMovie

- choose "export using quicktime" in the "Sharing" menu

- choose the correct codec settings (I choose a Quicktime movie with the H264 and AAC codecs, max quality, and recompress the movies with Handbrake afterwards)

- be sure to check the correct framerate (59.94 fps for my 2 cameras, I guess it should be pretty standard - you can always check it in the information window in Quicktime Player for a raw file from your camera)

- export and enjoy.

My wakeboard movies (which have a lot of detail and fast motion) look phenomenal in 720p60 and way better than in 720p30 on my big TV!!!

Thanks Apple.

I hope this helps all tho edit sports movies in iMovie!

MBP 17" i7 (2011) 2.3Ghz/8GB/SSD512, Mac OS X (10.6.7), and other Macs too

Posted on Jun 12, 2011 11:20 AM

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Answer 1

Jun 13, 2011 2:38 AM in response to jerome1989

I have a Sanyo Xacti so I have only tried the Full-HR option and as the camera does not support 720p60 I can't confirm what you say

The procedure you mention does not give errors with 1080p60 footage from my Sanyo however you will notice when you play the clip imported that something is wrong with it. It is scatty and lacks exposure it actually looks pretty dark. So to have something you can watch you need to downgrade the footage to 30p either directly or through quicktime

Which means at this point with the Xacti HD2000 you are better off shooting at Full HD 1920x1080 60i

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Answer 2

jerome1989 Author

Level 2

257 points

Jun 13, 2011 2:41 AM in response to Interceptor121

Hi Interceptor.

I never had any problem with 60p footage in iMovie.

However, I never used iMovie's import function.

I always manually copy the .mp4 files into a folder within "iMovie events".

After launch, iMovie does its magic and analyzes the files.

How are you importing your footage into iMovie?

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Answer 3

Jun 13, 2011 3:25 AM in response to jerome1989

I import them through iPhoto as that does not change the files to MOV.

The files look fine at first but when you move them into a project start having issues that are clearly visible in the playback though at first they would seem fine.

It is worth nothing that you don't click on optimise when you do the import iMovie merely repackages the MP4 into MOV changing the audio to PCM but leaving the H264 video stream unchanged.

My question is though have you tried 1080p60 from your Sanyo camera?

I believe 720p60 plays fine in quicktime as the codec supports it

BUT definitely 1080p60 does not play well. I can be sure of that because the original files from the camera are scatty too. This may as well be due to the fact I only have a 2.4Ghz dual core macbook. What hardware have you got?

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Answer 4

jerome1989 Author

Level 2

257 points

Jun 13, 2011 4:10 AM in response to Interceptor121

Hi again.

I do not have the Sanyo with me now but I definitely edited movies with 1080p60 footage from it - "Full-HR"; and not "Full-HD", which is 1080i60, see http://sanyo.com/xacti/english/products/vpc_hd2000/spec.html

I have sample movies edited and exported with iMovie'09 and they are perfect, and definitely 1080p60 (I had to do some tricks in iMovie '09 to export at 60 frames per second)

Are you sure you are using the correct setting on the Xacti (Full-HR)?

Have you tried manually copying the mp4 files with the finder to an iMovie event folder, as I do, without using iMovie or iPhoto?

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Answer 5

jerome1989 Author

Level 2

257 points

Jun 13, 2011 4:48 AM in response to Interceptor121

Hi Interceptor.

I found a sample 1080p60 movie from an HD2000 here: http://fr.akihabaranews.com/21910/review/sanyo-xacti-hd2000-un-volution-plus-qu- une-r-volution-la-revue

(sorry it is in french, look for "samples" to find the sample)

It is a 59.94fps, 23.77Mbps 1920*1080 movie as reported by Quicktime Player.

It is a 1080p60 movie (HD2000"s 1080p60 movies are 24Mbps, HD2000's 1080i60 movies are 16Mbps)

I placed it in a new folder within "iMovie events", launched iMovie'11 and edited a short movie with some titles, just to be sure iMovie had to render it, then exported it to 1080p, 59.94 fps.

The result movie is 59.94fps, 1920*1080, and seems flawless to my eyes.

720p60 output looks just as good, and plays fine on Apple TV 2.

Are you having the same results?

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Answer 6

Jun 13, 2011 5:00 AM in response to jerome1989

Yes it does import them fine

I think the issue us that you need a new icore machine to play the files

The MacBook takes ages and I hand an i5 mbpro on it's way i will try then

For the appletv I need to check between 720p60 and 1080p60 what it can manage

I have a first generation ATV with broadcom 70015 running ubuntu in theory it should work with 1080p60

Once you export to QuickTime what bit rate is used?

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Answer 7

Jun 16, 2011 1:50 PM in response to Interceptor121

OK with my new i5 MacBookPro all works well so the issue was with my old macbook

For what concerns the export you are correct you can use quicktime or mpeg 4 with H264 and set a max bitrate

For the sanyo the files are acquired at max 24000 so that is what you should set it to for max quality

Or set them to whatever your player can support. The encoding is efficient and there is no need for handbrake after

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Answer 8

Jun 19, 2011 6:23 AM in response to Interceptor121

Jerome

I have done some further work and found out that there is an excellent x264 encoder here

http://www003.upp.so-net.ne.jp/mycometg3/

With this plug in you can produce a final h264 high profile file directly from imovie. It has all the feature of handbrake and more so you can skip one step

I am experimenting downscaling to 720p60 (as I don't want to connect my Mbpro to the tv to watch and need to use an Apple Tv with Crystal HD) and it works pretty well squeezing files a great deal

Anyway without a core i5 it is too slow takes one hour for 3 minutes of footage on a 2.13 Macbook

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Answer 9

jonpais

Level 1

8 points

Aug 7, 2012 7:01 PM in response to jerome1989

Hi Jerome, I've been shooting with a Panasonic for several months now, but never even considered playing 60fps, as my Macbook Pro couldn't even handle 30fps without stuttering. I just installed 8GB RAM and an SSD, so I thought I'd try your recommendations. It seems to work just fine and playback is smooth. My question is, how does exporting to Quicktime "replace" the dropped frames after the video has already been imported and rendered in iMovie? I thought they were gone for good... Anyhow, this certainly was easier to accomplish than the acrobatics you have to go through to change the settings in iMovie to enable 60fps on import.

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