iMovie and Mac appz General Question

parallel · Post by **parallel** » Sat Aug 14, 2004 8:09 pm

Ok, so I'm working on my first AMV and I'm using iMovie. I've noticed there are other people out there working with iMovie and other software for the mac. Here's how I'm going about this:

0SEx - rip the source
DiVA - deinterlace, crop, convert to PNG
SVS - make clips small enough for iMovie
iMovie - edit, convert to uncompressed AVI
ffmpegX - compress with mencoder to Xvid

This seems to give me the best video quality I can get. Are there better free ways of doing this that anyone knows of? If you use iMovie, how do you make a vid? Do you have any hints or tricks for the mac and/or iMovie that you'd be willing to divulge to help out a n00b?

KirinRiotCrash · Post by **KirinRiotCrash** » Sat Aug 14, 2004 9:03 pm

Sounds like a good thing, but since iMovie converts ANY VIDEO dumped into the application's clip view or timeline to DVCPRO (not DVCPRO50), you should tell DiVA to use the DVCPRO (NTSC or PAL, depending on DVD footage) instead of PNG to save you some importing time in iMovie. But if you were using Final Cut, then you could probably stick to PNG or Animation.

As with SVS ... a quick Google search ran into this: http://www.chipersoft.com/products/svs.php ... looks like something worth using. I've never used it myself; I've always stuck to using QuickTime Pro and AppleScript Folder Actions built into Panther but this looks simpler for splitting QuickTime movies.

iMovie is your field there and uncompressed works best for obvious reasons but if you're tight on disk space, use Expert Settings and export using DVCPRO codec. From there, you can use ffmpegX to get converted to XviD.

parallel · Post by **parallel** » Sat Aug 14, 2004 9:35 pm

I did some experiments with converting the source to DVCPRO for iMovie, but whenever I did the quality really seemed to suffer. Maybe I had the settings wrong or something, is that how you do it? When I've put the finished xvids side by side (DVCPRO v. PNG) the PNG version came out way more crisp and bright. I've also tried Animation, it looked good but PNG was smaller.

Yeah, SVS is a godsend (I'm too poor for QTpro). There's another app I found called Clipcreator you could try, but for some reason the clips don't look as nice as SVS's after importing to iMovie.

ffmpegX has some problems handling DV files (at least it did for me) but I haven't tried it with 0.9n. I also want to get the best quality possible. I'm not too worried about the file sizes before import/after export from iMovie because I can just delete them, at least that's what I figure I'll do.

Are there any (free)plug-ins you've found particularly useful in iMovie?

BTW, I read your tutorial, you did a really nice job on it.

KirinRiotCrash · Post by **KirinRiotCrash** » Sat Aug 14, 2004 10:20 pm

Thanks for the remark on the tutorial.

Something I have learned when fiddling with ffmpegX and DV files is that ... it doesn't like raw .dv files. However, you can get away with it using the DVCPRO codec when encoding a QuickTime file. Apparently, there's some kind of difference when ffmpegX works with it. [this is using 0.0.9n, BTW]

I might want to rework my tutorial a bit to include some info on codecs and which ones ffmpegX will accept for XviD conversion (there were quite a few that didn't work when I tried it but I don't remember which ones). I haven't really bothered too much at the time I wrote that because my hard drive space was pretty slim but now that I have a 250GB external hard drive, I might give it a whirl.

I would guess in your situation why the colour was different between DV and PNG was that DV's colour space is YUV (TV colour) while PNG is RGB (Computer colour) but then again ... I never paid that much attention to colour other than some codecs are brighter while others are darker ... never did figure out the reasoning behind that. Additionally, I have found that .dv files like to glue themselves to 720x480 regardless of footage when viewed in QuickTime (but they look fine when in iMovie).

As with free plugins? Some of cf/x's plugins are free while others cost less than 5 bucks per plug: http://www.imovieplugins.com/ ... another nice set is this one: http://www.cis.rit.edu/~jerry/Software/iMovie/ ... even though the page says they are for iMovie 2, they work quite well in iMovie 4. Stupendous Software also provides some free effects that tag along with their demo plugins: http://www.stupendous-software.com/ ...

If you're willing to spend some money on iMovie plugins, there's also Virtix: http://www.virtix.com/imovie/ , and GeeThree's Slick volumes: http://www.geethree.com as well as those packs from Stupendous.

Good luck!

parallel · Post by **parallel** » Sat Aug 14, 2004 11:00 pm

DVCPRO is lossy though, isn't it? I don't want to compress any more than is absolutely necessary, you know? I'll give it a try though to see how it looks after an xvid encode.

As far as I know there isn't a mac guide here at the org. Redwolf's is nowhere to be found. You should talk with AbsoluteDestiny about having your guide hosted in the guides section, a mac guide is something the org should not go without IMHO.

Thanks for the links. I have some of cf/x's plugs but none from the others you mentioned (downloading new plugs is like opening a christmas present

I appreciate all your help, thanks.

KirinRiotCrash · Post by **KirinRiotCrash** » Sat Aug 14, 2004 11:14 pm

That's true. DVCPRO is lossy to a point (the bitrate usually sits at constant at 3.6Mbps while DVCPRO50 is at around 7Mbps) but iMovie assumes that any piece of footage used in a project comes from a DV camera so it converts it to DV for editing ... but since iMovie edits in DV, if you export using DVCPRO, you wouldn't lose any quality... of course, being paranoid, I would stick to lossless or uncompressed formats unless I'm confident enough that a certain codec won't butcher quality.

No problem really. It's just a little weird, sometimes.