Welcome to all Final Cut Pro and Final Cut Express Users

Capturing in iMovie for use in Final Cut

“Can I capture video in iMovie and use it in Final Cut?”

Yes and no. This is not as entirely seamless and straightforward as it might appear at first. HDV material and AVCHD material can be captured in iMovie and imported into Final Cut without problem. Both applications use the same video format. The problem arises with DV material. This is because the applications work in very different formats. iMovie uses the DV Stream format (.dv), which is multiplexed format in which the video and audio are combined in a single stream, the audio embedded in the video. Final Cut Pro and Express work in QuickTime separating the video and audio from the single stream into separate tracks as the material is captured, into a .mov file.

When iMovie DV material is brought into Final Cut the audio is still muxed (multiplexed) in the video stream. In the pro application the audio will have to be rendered out to play properly in the Timeline.

So how can this be avoided? There are a couple of solutions. The simplest is to capture your material in Final Cut. Many users like the way iMovie breaks clips up as the material is captured and can't do this in Final Cut. If you're working in DV there is a very simply way to break up your clips after you capture your material. See the page on DV Start/Stop Detect.

Another issue with captured material in iMovie you should aware of is that iMovie ignores the timecode information in the DV stream. It doesn't capture any timecode into the media files it creates. This means that you will not be able to recapture this material in Final Cut should you need to.

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