iMovie Process Flow, H.264 exporting?

[bhakesle]

Hello,

I am going to hopefully pick up my camera this week, but wanted some information/advice from the community first. I will be using iMovie HD (v6) on a MacBook Core Duo for some simple video editing and DVD creation. My plan is to do very simple editing in iMovie (remove extra scenes, add some transitions) and then send it to iDVD. Once this is done, I would like to export my edited movie to a HD 1080i or 720p H.264 formatted file that can be saved to a data DVD and eventually played on an AppleTV or similar device.

My questions are first, how does the HD footage look when scaled down to a DVD? How much disk space would a typical 30 minute movie take up while editing?

Second, has anyone experimented with the best h.264 settings to balance quality and file size?

Thanks!

[Eugenia Loli-Queru]

>how does the HD footage look when scaled down to a DVD?

Like a DVD.

>How much disk space would a typical 30 minute movie take up while editing?

20 GBs for the Apple Intermediate Format.

>Second, has anyone experimented with the best h.264 settings to balance quality and file size?

Depends how you export. First you will need to de-interlace using the freeware JES Deinterlacer. Then, for example, keep 2mbps for 480p, 4 mbps for 720p, 8 mbps for 1080p. And don't forget that Apple's encoder is not the best in the market. The open source x264 encoder yields better quality.

[bhakesle]

Thanks Eugenia. I was just reading your comments on another thread about JES Deinterlacer, as well as your tutorial for the 24p work flow. Very informative!

I have seen where iMovie HD doesn't support 24p, so I can't really take advantage of 24p if all I have is iMovie. Is this correct? How about iMovie 08? I have also seen where people recommend shooting in 24p in low-light, but let iMovie treat it as 60i footage. That doesn't seem right to me.

One of your comments said to import the raw footage using iMovie, edit as desired, export to an uncompressed format (DV?), use JES Deinterlacer to do the pull-down, then use FFMPegX (is this the open source encoder you mean?) to encode to the format of choice. Does this sound right? It sounds like I could use FFMPegX to encode to a iDVD friendly format as well as a h.264 HD version.

Once again, thanks for your help!

[bhakesle]

Ok, I think you already answered this question previously here:

http://eugenia.gnomefiles.org/2007/1...t-a-dell-dude/

Unfortunately I only have my mac book to work with for now. I guess the biggest question is what can I do with iMovie if I shoot a mix of 60i and 24p footage on the same tape? Should I stick with 60i? It would be nice to take advantage of 24p footage later once the s/w catches up...

[Eugenia Loli-Queru]

Stick with 60i. If you don't have the money to buy the right tools or hardware, stick with 60i.

[thewinelake]

Given that neither iMovie nor FCE support 24P, I wonder how many people are resorting to using Vegas within Parallels/BootCamp/VMWare?

[Eugenia Loli-Queru]

As I explained in the thread that bhakesle is quoting, Vegas through Parallels/VMware is a terrible idea, because DirectX is not running full speed. There is a big hit on performance, even if these are "virtualizers" and not "emulators". Only Bootcamp is a good idea as it runs a "clean" copy of Windows, with all the hardware running full speed. Although, Macbook's screen resolution is not that great for Vegas. I use 1680x1050 and I still hope I can get my hands on a 1920x1200 monitor to run Vegas.

[bhakesle]

What specifically is the "Open Source" h.264 encoder you talked about? Can you post a link?

Thanks again for your help, and patience with us "Newbies" :-)

[Eugenia Loli-Queru]

http://www.videolan.org/developers/x264.html
You would be better off using it via a GUI, like ffmpegX or Handbrake.

[rarefootagefilms]

I have iMovie. I just downloaded the JES program. Do you use the JES Deinterlacer before or after editing. What type of file does the JES Deinterlacer take?

thanks,
alex