iMovie '09 & iDVD: The Missing Manual

Importing Old iMovie Projects

Most software companies, most of the time, stick with certain time-honored traditions concerning software upgrades. One of them happens to be compatibility: If you release BeeKeeper Pro 7, it goes without saying that it can open files created by BeeKeeper Pro 6.

iMovie '08 and '09, though, are not actually updated versions of iMovie 6 (also known as iMovie HD); they're versions 1.0 and 2.0 of a completely different program, written from scratch. Their ability to import older iMovie projects is extremely limited.

To bring in an older iMovie project, choose File → Import → iMovie HD Project. The dialog box shown in Figure 1-14 appears. Here, you should make two decisions before choosing the old iMovie project you want to open:

• Where you want to save the imported, converted project. The "Save to" pop-up menu lists your hard drives and shows you how much space is available on each one.

• How you want iMovie to handle high-definition video projects. See Automatic Scene Detection for details on making a choice here.

Figure 1-14. In this dialog box, you specify what, where, and how you want to open an older iMovie project.

UP TO SPEED: Apple Intermediate Codec

iMovie can edit lots more formats than the old iMovie could, including MPEG-2 SD (from memory-card camcorders), MPEG-4, iSight video (Photo JPEG), H.264, and DV.

But if you import the two high-definition camcorder formats, HDV (high-def tape camcorders) and AVCHD (high-def tapeless), it must first convert them to AIC.

A-I-what?

AIC stands for Apple Intermediate Codec. The conversion from high-def into AIC is what takes so bloomin' long when you try to import AVCHD clips.

There's a good reason for this: HDV and AVCHD were never intended for editing. They were intended to store a lot of video quality in very little space on camcorders. So when you import them to the Mac, you're dealing with gigantic, unwieldy files that would make your processor wheeze and gasp.

Enter AIC. The AIC format retains all the quality of the original video, but is much faster to edit, play, copy, paste, and so on.

When Apple calls this converter "intermediate," it's not kidding; the video remains in this format only while you're editing. When you finally do something with the finished movie, it's usually converted back into another format, like the H.264 format for YouTube or the MobileMe Web Gallery (Chapter 13).

All of this explains, by the way, why you can't drag movies into the main iMovie window to import them. You have to drag them into an Event or use the File → Import → Movies command. Both of those mechanisms convert incoming movies into the AIC format (and create filmstrip thumbnails for them) to prepare them for editing.

Once you've made those choices, navigate to the iMovie project you want to import, and double-click its name or icon.

iMovie '09 springs into action, importing the video clips (making a new copy of them) and generating the filmstrip thumbnails that you'll work with as you edit. This process can take a good long time.

When it's all over, whatever clips you had placed into the iMovie timeline appear in the Project (storyboard) area, in the correct sequence, correctly trimmed. Leftover clips (the ones that were left unused on the Clips pane of the old project) are brought in, too. They show up in the Event that contains your project, just in case you want to add them to the project later.

On the other hand, iMovie brings in only a few basic elements of the original iMovie project. To be precise:

• You get only the clips. iMovie '09 ignores all effects, titles, and credits. (Ouch.)

• You lose all audio work you've done. iMovie '09 ignores everything in the old iMovie's two audio tracks, including music, narration, sound effects, or the audio "paste-over" cutaways.

• You lose all special transitions. If you used any transition effects in your older iMovie project, iMovie '09 replaces them all with generic crossfade dissolves.

If you really, truly want to go to all this trouble, you can now start over again, repairing and reconstructing the movie, restoring the elements that got lost during the import process. You might find the effort worthwhile if you want to use some of the iMovie '09 tools that aren't available in the old iMovie, like video cropping, stabilization, rotation, or one-click exporting to YouTube.

Otherwise, though, you might want to consider leaving your old iMovie projects just as they are. As Chapter 11 makes clear, the old iMovie version is still perfectly usable and freely available to you, so it might make more sense to leave it in its original format.