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Does iMovie '08 support AVCHD from the Canon HF10 without conversion?
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Professional Poster
Join Date: May 2001
Location: North Dakota, USA
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At least one review on Amazon says it takes a long time to convert the AVCHD of the Canon HF10 (and, presumably, any other AVCHD-based camcorder) to a file format natively supported by iMovie.
I see on the Apple site it says
iMovie supports standard and high definition video, as well as the most popular formats, including DV, HDV, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and even AVCHD.
So... I don't know what's the correct answer. Who has experience to tell me if there is a lengthy "importing" process with AVCHD files, and especially with the HF10? I would hope to use a standard SD card reader to read the SDHC cards...
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Posting Junkie
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: 888500128
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Fresh-Faced Recruit
Join Date: May 2008
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But has anyone had personal experience with the HF10? transferring movies to imovie? for that matter any of the AVCHD cameras? I am trying to decide on a new camcorder as well. I have a Sony miniDV camera and I would like to upgrade to a HD, but have heard that some of the HD cameras are not compatible with IMovie. I read the support page mentioned above, but would like to hear from someone that has one of these cameras and uses it with IMovie and has been pleased. thanks
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Senior User
Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: Minnesota
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I have the Sony SR11 and yes iMovie 8 does import the AVCHD files to apples codec. I actually use iMovie 8, then import to iMove 6 to edit due to plugins I use from geethree. iMovie 6 will not import AVCHD. As for burning HD to disc, use toast 9, provided you have a blu-ray player.
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2010 Mac Mini, 32GB iPod Touch, 2 Apple TV (1)
Home built 12 core 2.93 Westmere PC (almost half the cost of MP) Win7 64.
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Fresh-Faced Recruit
Join Date: Jun 2008
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I just bought the Canon HF10 and I am right mow importing HD-materials into iMovie. It works, but it takes time. Let me say it took 6 minutes to import 2 minutes. I was a little disappointed - thats why I found your post.
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Fresh-Faced Recruit
Join Date: Jun 2008
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For testing I made a 2 Minutes movie and now i am trying to export iton Full-HD. It takes 54 MINUTES on my Intel iMac!!! That scares me!!!
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Grizzled Veteran
Join Date: Aug 2002
Location: Central Texas
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Compressed Video is very CPU intensive. What do you expect?
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Posting Junkie
Join Date: Oct 2005
Location: Houston, TX
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It appears that iMovie doesn't really support AVCHD, it just transcodes it to some other format. The quality goes down (as with all lossy compression) and the filesize balloons (3-5x larger depending on if you choose quarter HD or HD). 
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Grizzled Veteran
Join Date: Aug 2002
Location: Central Texas
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iMovie uses the Apple Intermediary Codec. The reason is simple - AVCHD is not an editable codec. It is like MPEG2 - a format that works great for one time record and playback, but unusable for editing. To edit with any speed at all, iMovie has to transcode it into a format it can edit with.
Even Final Cut Pro does this - it converts to either ProRes (preferable) or AIC.
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Fresh-Faced Recruit
Join Date: Jun 2008
Location: USA
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MacBook
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.2 GHz
Memory: 1 GB
System Version: Mac OS X 10.5.2 (9C7010)
iMovie version 7.1.1
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