Editing HD iPhone videos with iMovie Mac

[bp1000]

Just wondering what the best workflow was.

I have a bunch of iPhone HD videos i would like to edit and i like the simplicity and effects iMove on the Mac gives me.

However i'm not sure what format to export to. I assume the iPhone saves videos in mp4 format? iMovie doesnt need to decode/transcode i can start editing straight away. But the issue is exporting the video takes quite some time.

Is there not an easier way to just save back to mp4? I understand there are editing in there but i also dont know which format to save to, obviously i dont want to go too big or too small, i just want to retain the quality of the original video and have it play on ATV2, Mac and iPad 2 & up.

Thanks

[phoenixsan]

the iPhone in mp4 format you can import it directly in iMovie to edit them. iMovie can import natively DV, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and AIC files. But if you have the videos in the iPhone in another format, maybe you have to extract the videos from the iPhone first and later convert them to a format native to iMovie

[Dave Braine]

Is there not an easier way to just save back to mp4?

If you're meaning how to export from iMovie, choose the Export Movie option from the share menu. This will produce a m4v file using h264 to compress it You should retain the quality and it will play on all your Apple devices.