I Have just purchased a Panasonic HC- V250 camcorder to record video images during a very special holiday. I intend to process this video in iMovie after the holiday. The Panasonic manual seems to suggest tha
iMac (27-inch, Late 2012), OS X Yosemite (10.10.3), iMovie 10.0.8
The Panasonic manual seems to suggest tha
It appears that the main point of your post is not complete?
HI Klaus1, thank you very much for your prompt response. I have looked at the link you recommended and it does give me some useful info.
However, I have to admit that this was the first time I had posted anything to the Apple Support Community - and the main point of my question seems to have been lost from the post.
What I really wanted to say was - the Panasonic manual seems to suggest that I should set my camcorder to record in "MP4 iFrame" mode if I intend to subsequently import the video into iMovie. This format appears to record less pixels (960x540) than say MP4 720p (1280x720) and I have read that the picture quality in iFrame lacks depth of colour etc despite the recorded data files being much larger.
So my real question is can I record in MP4 720p and successfully edit the resulting video in iMovie?
I Intend to watch the edited video on both my iMac 27" and on a Panasonic TV with a screen resolution of 1920x1080
Thank you very much in anticipation of your consideration of my somewhat uneducated questions
HI thesurreyfriends, you are correct in your assumption. This was my first post to the Apple Support Community and the main point of my question seemed to get lost.
I have restated my full question in my response to Klaus1.
I would be most grateful if you could read this response and offer your opinion.
Many thanks
There is a useful guide to iMovie 6 here:
http://www.macilife.com/PDF/iMovie_HD_6_Chapter.pdf
that you could download and which includes a chapter on formats.
The highest picture quality setting for your cam' is AVCHD 1080/60p (or1080/50p depending on NTSC or PAL.)
iMovie 10 can handle this 50 or 60/p whereas earlier versions could not without converting.
Also iMovie does not convert to AIC on import like earlier versions do (e.g. ver 8 and 9), hence it deals with it natively.
In short AVCHD 1080/60p (50p) should give you the best recording results and work well with iMovie 10.
A good idea to do some short tests with iMovie before your special holiday to give you confidence that you make the right choice.
Thank you for your help. I now understand some more about the choices of video format
Thank you very much. This is extremely helpful. The HC-V250 manual indicates that recording in AVCHD 1080/50p format uses the same amount of SDXC card space as iFrame 960x540 at 25p. So there is no space disadvantage in using the format you suggest. As you say that iMovie 10 can handle it, I will definitely run some tests over the next few days. The holiday starts in 2 weeks so, I should have plenty of time to ensure all is well
thank you again
You could also do some tests with AVCHD 50i HA setting giving you about 50%more recording time on your SD card. You may not notice any drop in quality, it depends on how big the TV is.
Also the quoted running time of the battery can often be ambitious, so check this out before your holiday or get a spare if you think that you will be doing lots of video before having the chance to re-charge.
Thank you again for your additional helpful suggestions. I have already bought a second battery as the manual indicates a full charge will only give just over an hour of recording. We will be cruising the Norwegian Fjords so do not want to miss anything we can't go back to the next day.
Have performed some recording tests today, inside and outside. Only 5 clips that total just under 6 minutes of video. Playback on the 42" TV is very good. Have put the clips through iMovie and exported to a USB drive, giving a file size of a bit over 900Mbytes. This also plays well on the TV.
The above test suggests that an hour of edited video at 1080/50p will occupy around 10Gbytes. Therefore,I will try your suggestion of using 50i HA format - although I assume interlaced video files may take longer to initially process in iMovie, as it constructs and stores complete frames from the interlaced input.
Thank you once again for taking the trouble to provide me with so many useful suggestions. My previous video experience has been with DV tape, with simple recording but more difficulty inputting to iMovie.
Best video format for input to imovie
