iMovie: Change project resolution

I’ve been using Adobe Premiere pro for a while now, but am finding that I can’t really defend the cost of Adobe Creative Cloud. While having multicamera support has been very nice, the product quite simply is cost prohibitive for me, especially as it really only offers a single feature I need; the ability to sync clips based on their audio. For my needs, iMovie will suffice.

I shoot all my video in 1080p, and that is also my preferred resolution for exporting my projects when completed. I recently ran into a problem where I was unable to export a project in 1080p, as it only offered 720p resolution. Looking at the project settings I found that it was set to 720p, and there was no apparent way to change that.

As it turns out, iMovie sets the resolution of you project based on the first clip added to the timeline, and ignores the fact that other clips may have higher resolutions. Luckily, there is a simple way of changing the project resolution; simply highlight all the clips, cut them from the timeline, and then paste them back into the timeline; this will automatically set the project resolution to the highest resolution present among the imported clips.