I’ve been messing around with video editing recently – it’s something I have never really looked at before as I have never had the power to do it properly, but one of the first barriers I ran into was suitable file formats for importing into iMovie.
I had a few old video’s that I wanted to play with (skiing vids / holidays etc) and I tried to import these into iMovie but I could not get them to work (they were in a variety of formats).
The video’s were a mixture of wmv, avi and other formats but iMovie refused to import them (or it pretended to import the file, which was even more frustrating!).
After much research I ended up using handbrake (which I use to transcode video for playback on my iPhone) and I set up a small file and transcoded it into about 12 different combinations of file type (the container, such as .avi or.mp4) and the codec (the file itself).
In the end I found creating a MP4 format file that is encoded with MPEG-4 using the ffmpeg codec worked a treat and iMovie was able to import the file with no problems.
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