Q: Will iMovie (4K) Work On Early 2009 iMac?
2.66 Intel core duo El Capitan 10.11.4. Graphics card is NVIDIA GeForce 9400 256 MB. Upgrading soon to 8G RAM. I read playback is choppy. What can I do to make it work? Thanks.
iMac, OS X El Capitan (10.11.4)
Posted on Jun 26, 2016 6:16 AM
4K video is VERY processor-intensive and your Core duo (and probably also the graphics card) are not powerful enough. Increasing RAM will help but not much (and note that your Mac will not be supported by the next operating system due out later this year).
I have just tried editing a 4K clip using a 2.2 GHz 2007 Core 2 duo Mac Pro from 2007 with 4G RAM. To my surprise iMovie does import the clip and allow editing, though it can only display an occasional frame when scrubbing in the timeline. I could also export a 4K movie (taking about 5 minutes for an 11-second movie!), though Quicktime Player could not actually play it properly - it just manged the odd frame. I then exported a 1080p version in about 2 minutes which it could play.
So there appears to be no software 'block' preventing you from using 4K material but, as I expected it is really not workable. It will be a bit better on your iMac but don't expect it to be useable. If you want to edit a movie in 1080p using 4k clips you would be better off converting the clips to 1080p before importing because 4K clips will not play properly in the timeline even if the project is set to 1080p.
By the way iMovie 9 can export 1080p provided the aspect ratio is set to 16:9.
Geoff.
Posted on Jun 27, 2016 1:46 PM