How to import/convert/transfer Photo Booth video to iMovie

I received a question recently from a friend who is having trouble in when he made a video in Photo Booth and was trying to import it to iMovie, sadly it was highlighted gray instead of black font.he also tried importing from my desktop, this had the same problem.

Photo Booth is a software application that created by Apple using a built-in iSight camera which can not only take photo snapshots and video clips in a Mac or other webcam. Photo Booth was reveiled at an invite-only special media event in October, 2005, Apple released Photo Booth alongside the Rev. C iMac G5, the first one with built-in iSight camera.

Photos and video clips taken with Photo Booth can be emailed, used as iChat icons or as photos for contacts in Address Book, or imported into iPhoto. Photo Booth includes a number of effects that can be applied to photos. The latest version of Photo Booth is included with Mac OS X Snow Lepoard.

So good it is for taking photos and capturing videos, Apple didn’t include a button to share the video with iMovie. And people sometimes have to rack their brains to work a way out. Some common problems regarding editing Photo Booth videos in iMovie can be listed as follows:

Common importing issues

Problem 1: “After recording, I dragged it to the disk top then opened iMovie. It didn’t work when I tried to drag it to the place that I am supposed to drag it into. It works when I dragged pictures, not for videos.”

Problem 2: “Hi, me and my sister and brother are making videos right now. We made through Photo Booth and we want to put them in iMovie. And I won’t import, I know it because of format, but can somebody please give me an instruction, very easy instruction please.”

Problem 3: “Well in Photo Booth I made a movie that is 4 minutes and 14 seconds long. I tried going into iMovie and selecting File > Import, and it’s almost done, but then on the horror, I got a message every single time saying: Error during Import, something like this.”

Problem 4: “I made a video from Photo Booth and I want to put little clips together to make one big movie and on iDVD it won’t let me and the whole movie just the little clips. So please help me and tell me how I can save all of my clips on iMovie together to make one big movie.”

Analysis and way

As to me knowledge and research, these problems are probably relating to version and compatibility and others as well. Some versions of iMovie are said to deal with video from Photo Booth, sometimes they actually did, but sometimes not due to various situations and I also noticed someone saying old Photo Booth only takes pictures, the Leopard version does the video. Formats compatibility can also be a big problem, for the videos made with Photo Booth are not with the proper file formats that can be imported to iMovie directly.

Those who want to edit their videos made with Photo Booth have to go through a conversion process, and I found on the Internet someone suggesting some free online converters which can be seen in the following websites like http://vixy.net and http://media-convert.com. But sometimes, perhaps there is no quick speed guarantee due to heavy load.

You may find it wonderful to try this video converter, which is more powerful than the above mentions two converters, it can deal with wide input and output file format and do converting fastly and efficient, I bet you worth a try.

Mac video converter helps you out

Video converter for Mac is a professional application that can convert/import videos made with Photo Booth to iMovie compatible MPEG-4 (MP4, M4V), MPEG-2, DV, HDV, MOV etc with fast conversion speed and best output quality. The input and output formats of this program are wide, including the popular standard format like AVI, WMV, MKV, MOV, VOB, MPG, MP4, FLV, 3GP, RM etc and high definition videos like HD AVI, HD MP4, HD MPG, HD MOV, HD WMV, AVCHD, TOD etc that can be played on portable devices and other applications.

Mac video converter is not only a wonderful Photo Booth video converter and player, it is also a versatile video editor that allows you to make your personal Photo Booth videos. For example, by Crop, you can adjust the aspect ratio of your video like Original, Full Screen, 16:9 or 4:3, by Trim, you can cut the video to a certain length to convert, by Effect, you can apply special effect to your video. Besides, you can also set the output parameters for your video, rotate the video, merge several video clips into a single big one, take snapshot when preview and extract audio files from video etc.

How to convert Photo Booth video to iMovie ?

Step 1: Save your Photo Booth video on the specific destination on your computer hard disk.

Step 2: Free download video converter for Mac, load Photo Booth videos, set the output format and path, do some editings needed and then convert, the whole process can be seen in the following picture.

After converting, you can import the converted files to iMovie for further editing.