Summary: In mention of iMovie, we all know that it makes viewing and working with video as simple as organizing your photos. Importing MP4 to iMovie is not a strange thing for most Mac users, and we can easily edit MP4 in iMovie in most cases. What’s the matter on earth that iMovie doesn’t allow you to select the MP4 file sometimes?
“iMovie won't import MP4, why? Sometimes, I can edit MP4 file in it successfully, but it also happens MP4 cannot added into iMovie. What's the solution?”
iMovie is one of the best video editing tools for Mac. With it, you can beautify your videos simply by cutting, cropping, merging, adding effects etc. to them. It works stable on Mac computer, so it's loved by millions of users. On the official site, it says iMovie 11 can support DV, MPEG-4, MPEG-2, MOV and M4V file types. According to this, you are enabled to import MP4 to iMovie. Thus, why iMovie 11 fails to recognize some MP4 videos? You'd better to know the reason clearly in order to avoid stumbling upon the same trouble repeatedly.
First and foremost, I wanna tell you that iMovie only accepts MP4 file which contains MPEG-4 and H.264 codecs. While, the audio, subtitle or other media source that embed in MP4 might have different codecs. In this case, we cannot judge the video format by examining the file extension name only. So it is impossible for the MP4 file to determine the type of streams in an MPEG-4 file based on its filename extension alone. Therefore, you may have some clues that why people using Mac always meet difficulty in importing MP4 to iMovie.
All in all, to smoothly import MP4 files to iMovie, you'd better to convert these MP4 files to iMovie totally compatible formats as we searched above. To get the job well done, we need to use an all-in-one program-Pavtube Video Converter for Mac. Besides converting MP4 files to iMovie, it can also convert other video formats including AVI, WMV, MPEG, VOB, MOV, AVCHD, MTS, M2T, M2TS, TOD, MOD, XAVC, FLV, MKV, SWF, 3GP, MVI, ASF and etc to iMovie video format.
A simple guide about how to import MP4 files to iMovie:
Step 1: Download and have a quick installation. The trial version will have a watermark on your converted files. Except for that, there are no time limitation, no virus, and no unnecessary bundle apps while downloading. After that, click “Add Video” button to load MP4 files. You can load several files at once thanks to “Add from folder” button.
Step 2: Click the “Format” bar to get the drop-down menu and you can get “iMovie and Final Cut Express”. Choose “Apple InterMediate Codec (AIC) (*.mov)” as best output format.
Step 3: Click “Settings” button to customize the output video and audio settings by yourself. But if you are not good at it, you’d better use the default parameters, they will ensure you a good balance between file size and image quality basically. You can change the resolution, bit rate, frame rate as you need.
Step 4: When everything is done, you can take a preview by hitting “Play” button. If you are satisfied with the final result, you can click “Convert” button to finish the conversion work.
Conclusion: When the conversion is done, you can click “Open” to get your generated files. Now, you can edit MP4 files in iMovie without any hassles.
Further Reading:
- A Simple Way to Import AVI Files to iMovie
- Encode/Decode PXW-X70 XAVC-L MXF to Avid MC 8 on Mac
- Rewrap MKV to ProRes 422/4444/LT/Proxy for FCP
- Import DJI Phantom 2 Vision+ Video to FCP 7 for Editing
- How to Convert 3D M2TS to SBS/Red-cyan MP4 for Sharing?
- Convert Panasonic CM1 4K MP4 to MPEG-2 for Premiere Pro CC on Mac
- Edit Samsung NX500 4K H.265 in Sony Vegas Pro 13/12
