So you're going to have to use another programme to do that. So what if all that fails? Well now you've got a video file, could be mp4, could be AVI, could be all sorts of other formats, and you've got to convert it to something which you can use. So just by installing the software, even though I never used it, suddenly made all that video available to be used in QuickTime, and even in iMovie for editing. In other cases you actually get the software you need with the camera on a CD, or perhaps as a download on the website, now sometimes it isn't obvious that this is what you're getting, for instance when I first got my flip camera I didn't want to use the software that came with it, but I didn't realise that by installing it I also installed a special Codec that allowed QuickTime to understand the AVI format produced by the flip camera.

A common one for instance is called MPEG2 now this format you actually have to license, it costs twenty dollars, you can get it through Apple and add it directly to QuickTime that's the easiest way and you may find it's surprising if you buy a camera that requires you to purchase this extra bit of software, which is why you should check beforehand. So why does this happen? Well, QuickTime is the underlying part of Mac OS X, which understands how to take dozens or even hundreds of formats of video and display them on your computer and allow you to edit them in iMovie but it doesn't understand every format, there are some out there that you don't have on your Mac But you can add them to your Mac so QuickTime can understand them. So why does this happen, and how can you fix it? Well first I would tell everybody that before you buy the camera to check the specs and check reviews online, especially reviews from Mac users, about using the cameras video with your Mac.īecause if a camera is incompatible with iMovie, and there are a few out there who are then usually there will be a lot of people talking and complaining about it, so you can avoid this problem by doing some research before purchasing. Somebody buys a video camera, and then takes some video, and then they try to bring it into iMovie and find that the file format that the camera exports is not compatible with iMovie. So this is a pretty common question I get. Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost Now, on today's episode we'll look at importing unsupported video formats into iMovie. Check out MacMost Now 362: Importing Incompatible Video into iMovie at YouTube for closed captioning and more options.

How to import videos into imovie on mac