Jul 112014

What formats does iMovie support?

iMovie is a Mac OS X or iOS based video editing software application created by Apple Inc. iMovie imports video footage to the Mac using either the FireWire interface on most MiniDV format digital video cameras or the computer’s USB port. It can also import video and photo files from a hard drive. iMovie supports multiple video formats and allows you to create projects that are tailored to your specific video format. You can use the following formats in iMovie: DV, HDV, AVCHD, Apple Intermediate Codec, Apple Animation Codec, Motion JPEG/A, iFrame, h.264, some, but not all, varieties of MP4, MOV. As .mov or .mov is a container, if it contains video codec in one of the above, it will import to iMovie, or it will fail to import to iMovie.

What if if you have video files which are incompatible with iMovie, such as MKV, WMV, AVI, FLV, WebM, DivX, XviD, DVD, VOB, DAV, AVCHD, MTS, M2TS, MOD, TOD, MXF and some MP4, MOV, M4V? Is it possible that to add those unsupported video files to iMovie for editing? In fact, about anything can be converted to a format iMovie can use. But what is the best video format for iMovie to convert video to?

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