Can you import a photoshop image into imovie?

It's just like a traditional video editing timeline, the lack of which was one of the main reasons iMovie HD users shunned the new incarnation. Click the Swap Events and Projects button in the toolbar, and you’ve got the timeline in its familiar place at the bottom of the screen. It’s important to point out that the new People Finder feature uses face-detection technology, which notices when a human is in the shot, and not face-recognition, which identifies specific people.

Even so, it’s helpful to be able to quickly view all footage containing people when you’re searching through hours of footage—but keep in mind that analysis can take some time; and analyzing just for people is faster than for stabilization. I had no troubles with People Finder, and even noticed that it correctly ignored a plastic action figure. The feature takes advantage of the under-utilized keyword tagging capabilities of iMovie (which appear when Show Advanced Tools is enabled in the application’s preferences).

With a little time and patience, you could create keywords for people who appear in your movies, use the People Finder to narrow the footage, then tag the person-specific keywords to the appropriate sections. If there’s any portion of iMovie ’11 that might disappoint longtime iMovie users, it’s the fact that not much has changed with the program’s core engine. Video shot as interlaced (such as 1080i, where the camera records every other horizontal line in every frame) can display combing artifacts.

Also, iMovie does not edit AVCHD video natively, but still transcodes imported footage into AIC (Apple Intermediate Codec) format for easier editing. This is presumably in order to maintain smooth interactivity when editing. (AVCHD manages to fit a lot of high-definition video into a relatively small space due to the way it compresses the video: after capturing a full image frame, many subsequent frames include only the pixels that have changed.

Editing the footage in real time requires more computational power to fill in the rest of the frames, which can lead to sluggish performance. I encountered this when reviewing Adobe Premiere Elements 9 ( ), which does handle AVCHD natively.) So, as with previous versions of iMovie, importing AVCHD video requires transcoding time before editing, rather than slowdowns during editing. IMovie also does not import raw AVCHD files, except when connected to a camera, or when you’ve used iMovie’s archive feature to offload the contents of a camera to the hard drive for import later.

To import the native compressed files directly, you’d need to run them through a conversion utility such as VoltaicHD. With the Rolling Shutter fix at its highest setting, the wobbly effect caused by moving a CMOS camera while shooting can be dramatically minimized. On the other hand, iMovie ’11 does now support video shot at 24p (24 progressive frames per second) without converting the rate, as the previous version did.

The exception is when you’re mixing video of different frame rates within a project, in which case the first clip added to the project determines the frame rate used. When clips in the Event browser have different frame rates than the current project, a yellow indicator badge appears with the rate.