iMovie 08 adds AVCHD support
 

From Engadget's feed from the Apple event today http://www.engadget.com/2007/08/07/l...ss-conference/ :

10:38AM: "Next up: iMovie. This is really interesting. Let me tell you the story. One of our video engineers went to the Cayman Islands, shot a lot of underwater HD, wanted to make a video for his buddies in half an hour. We found out couldn't do it. Engineer got out Final Cut Pro. Couldn't do it. Couldn't do great movie in 30 minutes. So he created an app that could do it. We were so blown away that we decided to use it. We're still calling it iMovie, but we're giving a new icon so we can show it's a whole new app. One library for all your video."

10:42AM: "Got one library for all video you've shot. Can scroll through it all just like your photos. Can rediscover and enjoy all your video as well as make movies more quickly. Takes video from any source. HDV, still cameras that do video, brand new AVCHD camcorders. This new Panasonic one is the best. Records hour of super high quality video on 8GB flash card. Skim to preview, doing for photo, why not for video? Can skim through it in faster than real time. Completely -- it's a far superior way to find stuff in your video library. Allows for super fast movie creation. Select video like you select text. Build a movie almost instantly. Add polish quickly, add music, sound effects, can drag photos, great titles, great transitions. All sorts of effects. Can view and share almost anywhere. This is the real key. You can go to share menu, make version for iTunes. Watch on computer, iPod, iPhone, Apple TV. Put on .Mac Web Gallery."

That's what Sony Picture motion Browser does that comes with all the Sony AVCHD cams like my SR7. Has calender view, date time etc. So what is new? Only problem is its very slow to encode/compile as it only uses a single core. I think that Pinnacle and Ulead also do this. I guess this is the first for a MAC.

Ron Evans

iMovie '08 Camcorder Support

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306171

The importation of footage from a flash or hard drive based camera is really nice to see. When I think about how I import footage from my HV20 it starts to really feel like I'm stuck in 1994.

The intro movie on Apple's site about iLife '08 notes that iMovie converts AVCHD as it ingests it. Doesn't give any indication of how long that takes or what format it puts it in. AIC probably?

Quote: Steve: "We do. Turns out that HD camcorders don't have sensors that are full HD, so they produce images that are slightly lower than HD, but are still stellar. We use that res, which is close, but not quite HD. Best you can do under $10k" Uh, that's not quite right, is it?

I thought that was funny.

Funny and demonstrative of his ignorance of virtually *all* HD aquisition systems.

It would be funny if Jobs actually said what was quoted.

But then again, what is full HD? If you take the output of current 1920x1080 HD video and compare it with the same scene shot with a digital SLR at 1920x1080 pixels, it's quite obvious full HD video isn't even in the same league as digital photo. This is what I think the Engadget blogger is referring to.

Considering that my antique of a G4 converts HDV to AIC pretty quickly I can't imagine that any of these Core 2 Duo machines to be slouches at the same task. Assuming they are using AIC in the new iMovie.

Now that give me an idea for more AVCHD support on the Mac. Maybe there'll be a LumiereAVCHD that'll process AVCHD into ProRes422 or AIC for FCP I'm guessing later on. Now the question is processing time...

I've only had iLife 08 for a day, but so far I haven't been able to import AVCHD files that I downloaded from the web, either from the hard disk or an SD card. I suspect it will only accept them directly from what it recognizes as a camera.

So far, that seems to be the case - I can't get it to import any of my previously-copied SR1 footage from an external HD. To make matters worse, at least some users (myself included) are getting nothing but garbled thumbnails and crashes in the import module, so at this point, iMove '08 isn't actually doing anything with our AVCHD footage.

The video editing reminds me of seeing the first Video Toast Flyer.

iMovie 08 works with the Canon HG10 for anyone interested

http://file.meyersproduction.com/hg1...20settings.png
http://file.meyersproduction.com/hg1...e%20import.png

Just to update this - still no luck with getting older footage imported, but the problems importing from the camera were caused by 3rd-party codecs (such as Perian and the avc1 codec available from the Apple site). In my case, uninstalling Perian cleared up the issues with the Import panel in iMovie '08.