Imovie Won't Let Me Export At 1080p

We’ve been trying to incorporate screencasts into more of our articles here at TidBITS—there are times when a short video conveys some point better than any number of screenshots. As far as tools go, ScreenFlow is the gold standard, but QuickTime Player can record screen actions and iMovie is a decent video editor. And both come with all Macs for free, so that’s where we’re starting.

But I recently stumbled across an infuriating problem: no matter what I did with my original screen recordings, I couldn’t use File > Share > File in iMovie to save a video file at a resolution higher than 720p. That’s not optimal for how-to videos with a lot of text, which are best viewed when zoomed to full-screen anyway. It’s also just the principle of the thing: I put in high-resolution 4096-by-2304 video, which is what QuickTime Player captured from my 27-inch iMac with 5K Retina display, and I expect to be able to export a 4K version of the file in the end. Your eyes will thank me!

The problem is that iMovie doesn’t let you set a project’s resolution manually—for that you seemingly need the $300 Final Cut Pro X—and on the Mac, it fixes the project’s resolution based on the first clip you insert.

So I edited a 2 minute long video. I selected export movie as usual. I selected HD and in the middle of the exoporting imovie said that there was not enough space in the heap zone. I thought ok so let me delte some stuff (there was alot). I tried it again and it happend a again. I thought I shoud try uploading in a loower quality. Nope nothing.

This problem has stymied many people, and there are numerous YouTube videos suggesting that you create a new project and drop a high-resolution photo at the beginning of the timeline to set the project to a higher resolution. That trick didn’t work for me. But I figured out a different way of convincing iMovie to allow me to export a 4K file.

Mixmeister fusion 7 buy for mac. MixMeister Fusion for Mac OS X 7.7.0.1 - MixMeister Fusion is a new tool to let you go beyond beat mixing - Top4Download.com offers free software downloads for Windows, Mac, iOS and Android computers and mobile devices. Visit for free, full and secured software’s. MixMeister Express 7.7 is a powerful tool that you can use to create a professional-sounding mix from your music files with a minimum of effort. MixMeister Express 7.7 is compatible with Mac and PC so no matter which system you're on (see system requirements on the right of this page), you can enjoy the world's most intuitive music-mixing software. MixMeister Fusion set the standard for combining live DJ performance with the pinpoint precision of the best music production software. Version 7.7 includes breakthrough new features like an enhanced timeline, improved time-stretching and support for Mac OS X. MixMeister Fusion doesn't limit you to simply combining a few loops and grooves together; Fusion is designed to mix complete DJ sets from full-length songs. Free to try Mixmeister Mac OS X 10.

First, using your iPhone, record a video at 1080p or 4K, whichever is the max for your device. Set the resolution in Settings > Camera > Record Video.

The length and subject matter of the video are irrelevant, as long as it’s at the correct resolution, so just record a few seconds of your foot to get a small file. Transfer this seeding video to your Mac however you like, such as letting iCloud Photo Library move it to the Mac, after which it appeared in iMovie’s Photos Library.

In iMovie, click Create New to create a new project. Drag the seeding clip you recorded into the new project’s timeline. Then drag in the screencast clips you want to edit.

If you are already working on a project that’s stuck at 720p, open it, click in the timeline, and press Command-A followed by Command-C to select and copy all the clips. Then switch back to your new project and paste those clips into the timeline after the seeding clip.

If you click Settings on the right side of the window, you’ll see the resolution is 1080p or 4K, whatever your iPhone recorded. And if you choose File > Share > File, you will see those resolutions as options in the Resolution pop-up menu. Once the resolution is correct, delete your seeding clip and continue to work on the project.

After figuring this out on my own, I stumbled across Apple’s official confirmation that the resolution of the first clip determines how you can export. But here’s the weird bit. Now that I’ve made iMovie export a screen recording as 4K, when I create a new iMovie project and add a screen recording to it as the only clip, iMovie lets me export in 4K, as opposed to the 720p limit I initially saw—no seeding clip necessary. Your mileage may vary, but it’s possible this trick needs to be performed only once to convince iMovie to allow screen recordings to be exported at 4K.

I don’t want to sound ungrateful, since iMovie is an impressive tool for the price, but hacks like this shouldn’t be necessary.

You can export a still frame image from a video many different ways with the software that comes with your Mac. If you are already in iMovie, you can use the sharing function to export an image from the current frame in the timeline or a library clip. In Photos you can save a frame in a video to your Photos library as a picture, and you can also copy the current frame and paste it into another app. The easiest way is with QuickTime Player where you can copy the current frame and then paste it into Preview or any other app that handles images.

Check out Export Still Frame Image From a Video at YouTube for closed captioning and more options.

Video Transcript: Let's take a look at four different ways that you can export a still frame from a video as an image on your Mac. Let's start with iMovie. A lot of times people want to do this in iMovie while they're working on a project. So, the first thing you want to do is you want to position the line in the timeline here on the frame that you want. You can use the Preview window here to view what it is you're over. So I can go over anything I want in here. Let's select this frame, for instance. Click on it and now you can see it still follows the cursor but as soon as my cursor leaves the timeline area it snaps to that position. This is what I'll get. I go to File, I go to Share, and Image. This will export the frame as a jpeg image. You can do the same thing using the Share button here at the top right. You can select Image. It's the same way to get to the same function. Now you can do the same thing with a clip, by the way. So I can click on the clip here even if it's not in the timeline. I can position the cursor where I want and click to place it there. You can see that's what's available here now. So now when I use File, Share, and Image I'm going to get this image here rather than the part of the video that's shown here in the timeline.Now in the Photos app, if you've ever have videos in there, it's pretty easy to export as a still image. There are two ways to do it. So let's look at the first way. I'm going to go into the video here and all I need to do first is find the frame that I want to export as an image. From there I can click the little Settings button here and you can see I can Export Frame to Picture. So what will happen is it's going to take a copy of this frame and export it as a photo. So now I still have the video there but if I look to my Photos Library I would see there's also a photo that's of this particular frame here. Of course it helps if the video is pretty high resolution to create a good photo. So that's the first way to do it.The second way to do it is something that won't create a new item in Photos. It will allow you to Paste the photo into another app. So I can just go in here. I've got the video paused on this frame. I go to Edit, Copy. Now I can go to another app. Let's go to Preview because it's very easy to paste something in Preview. As a matter of fact there's a file new from Clipboard function which will create a new image here and automatically paste in what I have in the Clipboard. You can see there I've got this now as an image in Preview. Now I can actually hit Save and decide, you know, what format to save it as and what file name, and all of that. That's the second way to do it in Photos. That will create a completely separate file outside of the Photos Library. The last way I want to show you how to do it is probably the simplest. Especially if you have the video as just a file on your drive. You can open up that file. It probably opens up by default in QuickTime Player. So let's do that. I'm going to double click on a video there and it opens up in QuickTime Player. Now I can play the video or I can pull the timeline here and find a frame that I want to use as a still frame. Now all I need to do is go to Edit and then to Copy. Just like before I can now open up in Preview and select New From Clipboard and it will paste that in there. It also works to paste it into another app like PhotoShop or even something like Keynote. Anything you can paste an image into you can Copy the frame from QuickTime Player and then Paste it into another app like that and get a still frame from the video.