When Apple updated iLife in January and iMovie 09 was announced, it sounded like a great way for a Mac owning 5D MkII user with little experience of video editing to have a bash at putting some clips together. In particular, the benefits over the previous version of iMovie looked appealing, particularly the image stabilization capability (which we’ll address in a later article in this series).
So iMovie 09 seemed to be a great solution until you actually imported the 5D MkII clips into it and tried to scrub across them. The result of scrubbing invariably led to an instantaneous crash of the app. This lit up the support boards at Apple and elsewhere, resulting in Apple’s official statement on the matter:
Now firstly, I should say that this solution from Apple is not the end of the world. If you are primarily going to upload your footage onto Vimeo or YouTube, or if you were going to view it with an AppleTV then the output is going to look just fine. On the other hand, if like many others you can’t stomach the idea of downgrading your beautifully composed 1080p footage in order to edit then it looked like you were going to need to get more serious and lay down more cash for Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere CS4.
But no, there is a solution. Converting the Canon 5D MkII H.264 .mov files to Apple Intermediate Codec allows you to edit the full 1080p content on iMovie 09 just fine.
So how to you do this? First, dowload a copy of MPEG Streamclip from www.squared5.com. When you open MPEG Streamclip just drag the Canon 5D MkII video files you want to convert onto the window. Note that MPEG Streamclip will join all of the separate clips into one large file during the conversion which I actually find convenient, but others may want to convert each file separately - unfortunately there is no built in method for batching this.
Go to File>Export to Quicktime…
This will bring up the following dialog:
Make sure that the settings are as shown above (the important ones are highlighted) and then hit Make Movie.
The one downside of using Apple Intermediate Codec, or indeed any other more editing friendly is that the file size will be larger than your original file. To give an example, a short 11 second clip straight out of the Canon 5D MkII is around 50MB, when converted to Apple Intermediate Codec using the above settings this more than doubles in size to close to 105MB. But hey storage is getting cheaper every day!
Anyway, I hope this helps you in getting your 1080p footage into iMovie 09. We’ll be covering more more iMovie 09 features with the Canon 5D MkII in future articles so check back soon.
