iMoviers: In what format do you store your iMovies?

kemistry

Registered
Hi,

I got quite some Gigabytes of finished iMovies on my HD. I was wondering what format (what video compression, audio compression settings) do you use for storing your movies? I'd like to burn them onto CDs, normally they are not that long (5 to 15 min). So I'd like to have the best possible quality but it should fit on a CD.
I tried VDC, but it is not a very good quality. Especially when you use text on the video it gets blurry. So, any suggestions?

thanks.
 
I store them in quicktime movie format. Both quality and compression are good. Plus iMovie's export has a setting specifically for "create movie for CD" so it's just a point-and-click operation. Smoooooth.
 
Well, it doesnt seem like you care about losing the clips and all, if you would be up for saving the final product in a single quicktime file, and burngin that. If you don't want to lose any quality, just buy a dedicated MiviDV tape and export the movies to that tape, you'd get liek four 15 minute movies on each tape at SP, which isn't too bad for 10$, i think each tape is liek 2gb, but unfortunatly you can't compress movies, and expect to get more time out of the tape.
 
Storing to DV tape is the best way to keep original quality since Quicktime compresses movies to reduce file sizes, thus causing a loss in quality.

The other option would be to keep the project on a hard drive or back it up to DVD-Ram (due to its huge size).

However, if you do the math (these are estimates, don't be too hard on me), it's a no-brainer:

DV tape = 1 hour video = $10
Hard drive (example: 40 GB) = maybe 2 hrs video = $200
DVD-RAM = about half an hour = $20 + your burner!
 
I have raw footage MiniDV tapes and then one edited footage MiniDV tape that I keep finished movies on.

But I also like to keep smaller Quicktime movies around on my hard drive and to send to family.

I save in 640x480, 30fps, H.263 codec, IMA 4:1 mono 44Khz audio. It's a very compatible combination that requires only QuickTime 3 or later (not 5).

I like the Sorenson 3 video compression better, but in my case the "more compatible" is of more importance.

Oh, one minute movies that I've compressed have gone to something like 7-12MB with a data transfer rate of about 200K/sec. The file size depends a great deal on how much motion there is in the frames. Tripod-supported footage tend to be a lot smaller!

-Rob
 
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