Summary: Can iMovie read MOV clips captured by a Canon Rebel T3i / EOS 600D camera? This post guides you through a workaround to convert Canon Rebel T3i / EOS 600D MOV clips to AIC (Apple InterMediate Codec), so that you can import and edit them within iMovie without any import issues.
More than capturing high quality stills, the Canon Rebel T3i camera (also called EOS 600D) can shoot spectacular movies in Full 1080p HD and save them in QuickTime MOV file format. On Canon’s official site, it provides Canon E-1 Movie Plugin to get MOV shootings working with iMovie on a Mac. However, for some reasons, some Canon 600D MOV clips can be read by iMovie while others not, even with the plugin installed. Then here comes a question, how can I import Canon Rebel T3i / EOS 600D MOV clips into iMovie for further editing?
Generally speaking, people usually consider transcoding the Rebel T3i H.264 videos to Apple InterMediate Codec (AIC), the best suited editing codec for iMovie, which is fully compatible with iMovie 8/9/11. When a 1080p HD H.264 MOV file is encoded into AIC, it can be load to iMovie instantly without rendering. The guide below displays you how to convert Canon T3i MOV to AIC, the editing format specially developed for iMovie.
What you’ll need?
Video Converter for Mac
Transcode MOV files taken with Canon T4i/600D to AIC for iMovie
Step 1: Start up Video Converter for Mac (In this guide, we use it as a Canon T3i/600D to iMovie Converter). Click ‘Add File’ button to import H.264 .mov shootings captured by your Canon T3i/600D camera. You are allowed to load directly from a camera or from a card reader, or from a folder on your HDD that stores your source media.
Step 2: Select output format for iMovie
In order to edit 1080p .mov shootings taken with the Canon Rebel T3i / EOS 600D in iMovie, do as below:
From the Format bar, choose ‘Apple InterMediateCodec (AIC) (*.mov) as output format from ‘iMovie and Final Cut Express’ catalogue. The AIC codec is also accepted by Final Cut Express and Final Cut Pro.
Important: If you’ve loaded a number of MTS clips to do batch conversion, please do remember ticking off ‘Apply to All’ option before you start.
Step 3: Adjust video and audio settings (optional)
If you want to custom video and audio settings in your own way, you can click ‘Setting’ button and go to ‘Profile Settings’ panel to do so, if not, skip this step.
Step 4: Finally, click the ‘Convert’ button to start converting Canon T3i H.264 mov clips to AIC for using within iMovie 8’ 9 or the later version. You can tick off ‘Shut down computer after conversion’ checkbox, and go away to do other things instead of waiting around in front of the computer for the entire conversion process
Step 5: As soon as the conversion finished, click ‘Open’ button to find the exported AIC .MOV files.
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