Using MPGs with iMovie
Posted on Monday, June 26, 2006 @ 18:29 CET
I've gotta say I'm loving OSX. Especially with goodies such as QuickSilver and VirtueDesktop which make my life easier. I'm slowly getting used to iPhoto coming from Picasa, and I like iPhoto just seems smoother. The same thing goes for iTunes, its just so much smoother than when running in Windows.
Then theres iMovie. I'm used to editing on Windows using Vegas, a brilliant piece of software that Sony bought from SonicFoundry which you can use to do anything from editing and remixing audio to editing video. I have a Sony Cybershot DSC-P93 camera which can shoot endless amounts of 640x480 video until the memory stick is filled up. The video is stored as a muxed MPEG1. iMovie does not liked muxed video.
Ji was visiting this weekend, and we went to Tusenfryd with Spz and Nina. We both took a bunch of pics and video, me using the DSC and Ji with her Fuji FinePix Z-1. Her Fuji stores video as Apple OpenDML JPEG.
In any case, I imported the media from both cameras into the MBP using iPhoto. The video played back fine in QuickTime but when after importing it to an iMovie project, the sound wouldn't play back on my clips. Reason being the muxed video format the DSC uses is not supported by iMovie.
After posting a question about this on Apple's discussion forums I learned that I had to convert the clips to DV using MPEG Streamclip. Converting it to DV using QuickTime didn't work, no matter what audio setting I selected the audio track simply wouldn't get converted. Thankfully, MPEG Streamclip worked exactly as advertised.
Now the crappy side of it. A 2 minute clip took about 2 minutes to convert to DV. That's fine. However, iMovie took 11 minutes to import the 2 minute clip. On a 2.1GHz machine with 2GB of RAM. That's way too long.
Keep in mind my iMovie project was an MPEG-4 project since the video resolution of the clips (640x480) was below DV quality (720x576). Later I was tipped to the fact that converting from NTSC to PAL could be the reason for the long import time.
I couldn't find where to change the project setting so I created a new DV project and set it to PAL and now the clips take under a minute to import. Excellent.
Now I just have to get some Automator actions together to do this automatically from now on. That and figure out what encoding options work best from the plethora available with QuickTime.
- paulo
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Comments:
The conversion to PAL is one reason for a long import time, another is the conversion to MP4 when importing to iMovie, and a third is that you're copying and converting at the same time on the same hard drive. Chunks of data have to be pulled into memory, converted, and the converted file written to disk; it's not unlike juggling one-handed. As for the QT encoding options, that depends on how you want to use the finished file: on a web page, an iPod, CD-ROM, etc.
Glad you found a system for importing that works.
# June 27, 2006 14:57 CET
Good points. As for the DV projects I think iMovie converts everything (video and images) to DV.
The QuickTime options I mentioned are when exporting the project under Expert Settings. Everything I've tried so far (QuickTime movie, DV Stream, MPEG-4) gives me crappy results when it compressing images although I'm using H.264. The images are all larger res than the movie project so I'm not sure what's going on.
In any case, I guess its just something you have to find out by trial and error so I'll get the right setting eventually. Rendering times are a bitch though :)
# June 27, 2006 23:35 CET
The images alone should compress decently, but once they're converted to DV, they're limited to DV resolution. The video clips are suffering from all the conversions. Going from the lossy compression of MPEG and JPEG to DV and then through another lossy compression to H.264 means lots of time for less than stellar results, unfortunately. You're a good candidate for Final Cut Express, which will give you much more control over your import and export options. Again, good luck.
# June 28, 2006 15:54 CET
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