Hi Everybody. I dusted off an old download of Apples first iMovie program and was wondering if there was a way to import Carrara animations into it. I've played around a little bit last night but was unsuccessful, I would like to demo a project for my boss. If anyone has tried this I would greatly appreciate any help and I'm certain that good karma will find its way into your day. memaci

I have tried it, iMovie is rather flexible (the more recent, the more flexible). Any Quicktime-variety animation should cause no problem. I also used AfterEffects to put the Carrara animations in layers and what you have. It works rather good. I bought Final Cut later in the process, actually because I missed the point about non-square pixels and thought my iMovie couldn't cut it. So. It depends on the file format of the Carrara animations... Non-compressed is best, but will eat your harddisk like it is young cheese (?). Good luck!

yup.. basicly you just have to make sure you are saving as Quicktime and don't use some 3rd party compression... use only quicktime suppoerted.. it works great.. one other thing.. when you render the orginals in carrara.. make sure the size is equal to or greater than you want your final movie res to be. Imovie can down size the resolution, but it's kinda crappy at upsizing. same goes for frame rate etc.

Works great. I use both Carrara and Poser to render animations (mostly to sequential TIFFs w/alpha channel), composite in Combustion (saved as uncompressed QT) and import into iMovie. Quicktim uncompressed as mntioned above is the best format to import into iMovie.

Thanks everybody. I'm still not having any luck though. I'm either not getting it or my version of iMovie is too old (first version) that I cannot import the files. I have no problem importing still images just can't seem to get my animations in. memaci ?? young cheese??

should work.. i was doing it with the first version all the time

no need to "import" the file. Render the QuickTime file and leave it on the desktop.Then drag it into the open iMovie clips panel. Try a 2 second 720x480 ( or 640x480) render and it should copy right into the clips pane. Then drag it onto your timeline.

As others have stated, use Quicktime. But if you can, render or export the animation using DV. This way the animation will be in the format best used by iMovie. If you render with other compressors or resolutions then iMovie may scale the video and it may loose its proportions. Regards, Paul

I just wanted to say thanks to all for such speedy answers. I know this all seems pretty simple to all of you unfortunately even with all the help I can't seem to get my quicktime animations into iMovie. I will try to explore the options better when I have more time. For the record I did try all the suggestions. Again many thanks. memaci

Is it a problem with iMovie? What version of iMovie, and what exactly isn't working, the export from Carrara or the import into iMovie? If you have the quicktime or dv movie, you should just have to drag and drop right into one of iMovie's clip boxes. Or you could go to file -> Import and choose the file(s) you want... I just tested this and both ways work, I was able to drop a DV file and a quicktime .mov file and both were imported into iMovie. My version is iMovie HD (5.0.1), but I have also tried it with v4. Regards, Paul

Thanks again for the help and I have tried the ol' drag and drop and it simply doesn't seem to work. I tried numerous file types including a quicktime .mov file. I have the very first version of iMovie and C3 running on an OS9 based Mac. I haven't given up on the process but I am taking a break. I simply seem to have software issues or am missing something very obvious. Thanks again for the help. memaci

Ok. Maybe it is an OS9/ iMovie 1 thing... I am using OS X, but I would think it should still work. If I can find anything out for you, I will post it back here, or if you solve it let us know what the deal is in case it pops up again... Regards, Paul

Thanks. Good advice. I let you know if I find anything out. memaci