Quicktime Player 10 lets you convert a movie created with a mobile phone (3GPP format) to MPEG-4... For Free!
UPDATE: Just simply change the file extension from .3gp to .m4v and you’re done. Thanks Jason for the great tip!
Eureka!
This is something I’ve been trying to do for a long time, but just couldn’t found out how… until today!
And I thought, I’ll share it here as after all these years, I haven’t found anything on the Web to help me do this. Which by the way, I found out by pure luck.
The problem. All the latest mobile phones I had (from a Motorola Razr to the Google Nexus I’m trying out now) can record videos using the 3GPP format.
But, inexplicably so, Apple’s iMovie (I’m using the latest version 8.0.5) would not recognise nor import those mobile movies.
My solution. So to import a 3GPP movie into iMovie, I would first convert it, using the free Quicktime Player (i’m using version 10.0), to MPEG-4 (with the .M4V file extension). And then, import it into iMovie.
Here’s how I did it:
- Open the 3GPP movie in Quicktime Player: File -> Open File
- Share it with iTunes: Share -> iTunes
- Choose the Apple TV size (better quality but larger file size) and click Share
- Quicktime Player will add the .M4V extension to the original name of the file
- After the file appears in iTunes, you can import it using iMovie.
It’s not as straightforward as if it was possible to import a mobile phone video directly into iMovie, but it does the job. Moreover, it’s free!
Great tips. I haven’t tried this yet and thanks for sharing. At least it is free!
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Informative blog post, thanks for the heads up.
what a coincidence! I was just looking on how to import 3GP videos to iMovie and I’ve spent the last hour looking for this information.
luckily I found your post, thank you
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Good resource for reading. Thanks
It’s a good thing that you were able to find a solution to that problem. If I’ll encounter that in the future, I sure would go back to this blog.
Awesome find! I have been wanting to find out how to import mobile phone movies (3GP) into iMovie ’09 for a long!
Thank you so much for the tip!!! It works beautifully!
wow it worked, thank you
…or, you can just simply change the file extension from .3gp to .m4v and be done.
very helpful. Thanks
Thanks for this tip!
This was great help! Thank you so much for sharing!
For me, it was not possible to do like you did so I tried “Save to web” in quicktime. That created a .m4v file and some other filer for the web. So, without you I had not thought of that! Thanks man!
thanks so much this is excatly what i needed!!!