Can IMovie really do it?

Question

I find something very interesting missing from the many postings here. Has anyone in fact imported HD footage and then edited in HD in IMovie? If so, please tell us about it. How long did it take? What was the differences when editing HD in IMovie vs DV footage? How about those Gee Three plug-ins. Did they work fine while editing in HD?
The bottom line.....Can IMovie really edit HD footage and produce a clean HD movie? Is Apple just hyping when they say you can editing in HD in IMovie?
Emac   Mac OS X (10.3.7)  

Answer 1

Yup; I edit HDV with iMovie HD (5 and now 6).
As Karl suggests, d'you really think it'd be called iMovie HD if it couldn't? ..And would the Sony man have jumped up on the stage with Steve J at MacWorld the other year to push the Sony FX1 camcorder if it couldn't?
..OK; I know iMovie 3 couldn't edit video properly, to start with ..but yes: you can edit HDV with iMovie HD. The results are beautiful.
There are, however, a few things to bear in mind:
1 - The faster your Mac, the faster iMovie will work with HDV footage. The Mac has to convert, on the fly, from the MPEG-2 format of HDV into the DV/QuickTime format which iMovie uses ..while you're importing. On my Mac mini and G4 PowerBooks that meant that importing the footage from the camcorder took twice or three times 'real time' to import ..sometimes 4x real time. So importing can be -s-l-o-w- ..That's why I eventually got a faster Mac, after checking out import speeds at the London Apple Store on their hardware. I bought the fastest Mac I could which was also a PowerPC. So I got a quad G5, with 4GB of RAM. This imports HDV in real time, so importing is exactly like importing normal DV. No faster, no slower: identical.
2 - Editing in HDV is exactly like editing in normal DV ..in fact it's the same as normal DV once it's imported and temporarily converted into Apple's Intermediate Codec format. Everything works just like normal: transitions, titles, importing pictures and sound, etc. Rendering titles and transitions, etc, took longer than normal DV on the G4 Mac mini and PowerBooks ..but that's not surprising, as every HDV frame has about 4x the information or detail in it. Rendering is back to the speeds of normal DV using the G5 quad.
3 - Outputting back to a camcorder is just like with normal DV ..except that it takes a LOT longer! ..The edited material has to be converted by the Mac from the temporary Apple Intermediate Codec format back into "Long-GOP MPEG-2" format to send to the camcorder ..and that took, on those G4 Macs, about 10x real time. So an hour of video had to be left overnight to Export back to a camcorder. On the G5 quad I've got that down to under 2x real time by (a) using a faster Mac, (b) keeping projects on a second internal disc, instead of on the main system disc or on a - slower - external FireWire disc, (c) using the fastest possible (10,000rpm) internal disc (..a 74GB Western Digital 'Raptor' ..there is a later, higher capacity - 150GB? - version, but that - reportedly - may presently have problems in a Mac, without a separate controller card to drive it). I intend to 'RAID' or to 'stripe' two of these WDs together, when the appropriate controller card arrives, to give what promises to be even faster disc access, and that may cut the export time even further, to perhaps around 1.5x real time.
I haven't yet used GeeThree plug-ins with HD footage: I tend to be rather conservative with my transitions, and just use simple things - usually - like cross dissolves, Fade In and Fade Out and - especially - Wash In and Wash Out. GeeThree (see their site) could probably give you more info about their plug-ins for HDV.
iMovie 6 originally gave very badly jerking PAL DV output to camcorders, as if it was sending NTSC 30fps video instead of PAL 25fps. Matti pointed this up, and the 6.0.1 update was very quickly posted, and has fixed that problem. (If you only use American-style NTSC video, you probably wouldn't have noticed this oddity.)
"..Can IMovie really edit HD footage and produce a clean HD movie?.." Yes, absolutely. I haven't got round to exporting any as QuickTime H.264 and putting it up on the web, but I shall eventually (..sometimes I have other things to do besides fiddling with video..!) and then you'll see - roughly - what it looks like.
"..Is Apple just hyping when they say you can editing in HD in IMovie?.." No. They're absolutely correct. But you do need a fast Mac to make the most of it, so that importing, rendering and - especially - exporting don't take t-o-o -l-o-n-g-