Sanyo HD1010 and iMovie 09

After shooting Anthony Sedlak at Eat! Vancouver show Friday night, I’ve imported footage from my Sanyo Xacti HD1010 into iMovie 09. I was so happy that by converting .mp4 files into .mov it actually reduces size by 50%. The truth was - it only imported half of the clip.

I am shooting all my movies at 720p@60fps, that way I still get good resolution, but action is way smoother. I’ve been copying them from mounted Xacti to new folder in iMovie Events folder, letting iMovie scan it, and edited afterwards. All was working fine, until one day I’ve noticed I can import movies straight from camcorder to iMovie 09.

I was quite happy, especially when I found out that file sizes shrank in half, what was 600MB, became 300MB - awesome, saving space! Well this weekend I realised that it wasn’t that good. In fact it was terrible, how come I didn’t see it before.

After importing footage shot at 60fps, iMovie informed me that all 15 minutes was imported sucesfully. After watching video, I noticed that some stuff is missing. The most important thing was missing - plating halibut wrapped in prosciutto! No way! I didn’t film that??? I must have, it’s impossible. I opened still mounted as external drive Xacti, and using QuickLook browsed footage - woof, it’s here.. So here is the clip, let’s go back to iMovie… WTF!? clip in iMovie is 5 minutes, while original is 10. I’ve reimported clip again, same thing…. I tried other clips - no matter which one I tried, iMovie, after displaying that full length was imported, actually imported only half of the clip.

After Googling the problem, and finding couple of posts on Apple’s forums, I’ve came to conclusion - 60fps clips are not importing right. I guess there is simple math behind it:

iMovie scans file - 5 minutes=300 seconds which, at maximum rate of importable files of 30fps equals to 9,000 frames (300*30) so it imports 9,000 frames. But in reality those 9,000 frames, at 60fps, equals to 150 seconds, or 2.5 minutes, that’s where it stops. But iMovies still displays that it imported 5 minutes.

Good thing that I have not deleted any of the files from the card, as there were more that 10GB worth of videos including our recent family camping trip.

So next time, when I want to bring footage from my Xacti to iMovie, I will make sure I would do File -> Import Files rather than using camcorder import interface to avoid the problem.

Tags: Apple, Blogging, Gadgets, Video