iMovie to Premiere Elements 15

Hi

After literally months of messing about with video quality (iMovie - FCP - Premiere) I have come to the conclusion that for my needs, Premiere Elements 15 outputs the best quality for Blu-Ray.
I have now returned to some older footage I have, that needs re-editing, which is on Mini Dv tape. Sadly, PE 15 no longer supports the import of tape based cameras, but I have been able to import to iMovie, then point PE15 to those captured files and bring them into PE15. All seemed to have imported fine, but then I noticed that between me importing the footage from the iMovie library and it landing in PE15, it has shortened nearly all the clips! If I go into iMovie library and play the files, they play in full (so they have been captured correctly) but once in PE15, they have a duration of about 10 seconds - even the clips that are 5 or 6 minutes long.

Can anyone please help?

Thanks

How are you getting the movies from iMovie? I am wondering -are you exporting the capture to a file out of iMovie? If not how are you importing into Premiere?

Lisa

Hi

When I open PE15, I click on "Add Media" then "Files and Folders" then I direct PE to the iMovie Library file. From there, it sees all the files and I highlight all of them and click "import". The media then appears in PE15 and I can drag clips to the timeline. They all look fine and play fine, they are just not the full length of the clip.

Thanks

Try exporting one of the clips from iMovie to a different folder and see what happens. You just click on the little box on the upper right corner that looks like a box around an up arrow. Select file and go from there.

Lisa

Hi

Your suggestion has worked. Thank you. My question is, as I exported the footage from iMovie as a file....will this not render the footage for export, which I will have to do again in PE15? Just trying to avoid a double rendering situ.

Very many thanks.

Unfortunately, yes you will be rendering and encoding the videos again but it is unavoidable. It won't hurt unless you start using different encoding settings. Just pay attention to frame rates which must stay the same. That way can lead to madness and ugly video issues. I suspect when you captured the video in iMovie it created little thumbnail compressed video - or some such thing - and that is why you could not just grab it.

I really find it strange that Adobe dropped capture from Premiere Elements. It is still available Premiere Pro CC. I guess they believe everyone is done with tapes.

Lisa

Hi

Many thanks again for your help. It is much appreciated. Yes, it is surprising that Adobe dropped tape capture from PE. The annoying thing is, when you click to add media, there is a button for MiniDV and tape, which when pressed, opens the capture window, but nothing happens once the camera is connected. After contacting Adobe, they confirmed that support was dropped from version 13, although the button still remains !!

Again, many thanks for your help and advice.

Philip