converting MKV to iMovie format

I would like to convert a 3GB MKV to something I can work with in iMovie. Usually I convert things to DV in Quicktime 7 Pro because it seems to just work. However, with this 3GB thing my Macbook wants 9 hours to do this conversion and I don't have 9 hours.

My work computer is a Xeon quad-core i7 with 12GB ram (i.e. million times faster than my Macbook) and I could use it instead but it is a Windows 7-64 machine.

Does anyone know of a faster or smaller file (than DV) way of getting this video into iMovie?

Altenatively, does anyone know a Windows application I could use on my work computer to do this conversion of MKV into DV?

Which formats are good for bringing things into iMovie without losing bunch of quality? In the past when I have tried converting things to MOV and MPEG4 I feel like iMovie wouldn't work with them. But now I've forgotten which formats exactly they were that didn't work. I've basically just always used DV because I knew it wouldn't lose quality and that it would work. But now I have this 9 hours obstacle which I've never faced before.

I guess I'll look at Handbrake but what formats should I try? Are not any of the ones that Quicktime Pro 7 will do just as good as anything Handbrake does?

duky said:

I believe I've imported MPEG4 files into iMovie without any problems. You can set Handbrake to 100% quality during the conversion and you should not get any quality loss. I'm doing such a conversion from MKV to MP4 and it is quoting me a time of around 1.5 hours. Could be worth a try since it does not take too long.

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Well thanks for the advice. It'll be very handy in future too. Unfortunately, Handbrake looks like it's going to take over 4 hours to convert this movie on my Macbook. I tried installing Handbrake on my work i7 machine but, even though DivX Player will open the movie, for some reason Handbrake won't recognize it as a supported file type. Any other suggestions maybe on why this would be happening or any other Windows tools that might get the job done?

This is complicated. I need to read a book or something. Just surprised video is so much more difficult than audio. I hate the transcoding that takes almost 5 hours. I got Handbrake to finally do it (after it failed a couple times), and then I import the mp4 into iMovie (which takes another 2.5 hours). So that all works at least though it's annoying as hell. But then once it's in iMovie the quality sucks.

The movie is a black and white film from the sixties that's nice and sharp. But in iMovie all the darker shades of grey (the ones in shadows in dark) are severely pixelated like there're not nearly enough shades of grey available so it creates really distracting effect of big sections of pixels hopping around between different shades of grey. I'm amazed at how crappy it looks. Most of everything else is alright but any time the people what through some shadows or sit in car or something all of the sudden there's all this extremely distracting pixelation in the lowlights.

Why would I be getting this? It looks like this both in preview while working in iMove and outputted with highest possible settings. I so notice that in iMovie it has become 960 rather than 1280 resolution even though I selected the option for importing at original resolution.

I have Perian and MPEG Streamclip but the MKV will only open in Divx player which doesn't seem to have any Save abilities. Why can't iMovie just open the container and bring in the H.264? At least that would maybe get rid of one of the two long wait times. When you talk about exporting to Apple Intermediate Codec, at what stage of things are you referring to? Handbrake only does transcoding to mp4.