best compression using imovie

[howard]

I have a friend who wants to compress some of his dv files to make space

what is the best format to compress to to keep as much quality as possible while saving as much space?

avi? mpeg? mov? or something else?

thanks

[7on]

I like Mpeg4. Make sure you convert a clip first to see if the quality is good enough for you. When you get it right. BOOM it'll be good. You might want to rename the .mp4 to a .mov because Windows has some problems with non standard ISMA files, unless it ends in .mov.

[Horrortaxi]

what is the best format to compress to to keep as much quality as possible while saving as much space?
It's not the format so much, though I do like mpeg4 and .mov. The problem is that to get the file down that small you're going to throw away a lot of information that you can never get back. There isn't such a thing as keeping quality high while keeping file size down.

What does your friend ultimately want to do with the files? That will dictate how much he should/can compress them.

[howard]

he is running out of hard drive space and wants to store some of his dv files so he can veiw them at any time.

i'm not to familiar with video compression. I wasn't sure if it was comparable to audio, like aac at 128 is better quality and less space than mp3 at 192 or whatever. I'm just curious of mpeg4 is better than mov or better than avi.

[BornAgainMac]

Check out the Apple Trailers. Notice the quality of the video. You can see what codec they use by viewing the Movie Properties using Quicktime. I don't recommend MPEG-4 now because it just isn't as high quality as some of the other codec formats that are part of Quicktime. I prefer Sorenson Video 3 (I got the Pro version) and Photo Jpeg codecs for the quality of the video, size, and still have the ability to edit the video (some loss of quality will result when editing and re-exporting with lossy compressed video). MPEG-4 will be more competitive with Tiger and the Mpeg-4 H.264 standard.

Experiment with the frames per second and bitrate until you find the combination that looks good for you. Try experimenting with a small 30 second clip vs some 2 hour video to save encoding time.

Also if you want to keep an archive of all your video that you still want to edit, I think DV tapes are the best compared to using a firewire hard drive from a cost standpoint. Archiving to DVD is fine but when it's in MPEG-2 format, you can't edit the video anymore.

[howard]

thanks for the tips bornagainmac, that helps a lot

[Horrortaxi]

If he ever wants to edit the movies again, he should export them back to his camera. After that he can use whatever format/codec looks good to him. If he's only going to look at it on a computer then any of Quicktime's built-ins ought to be fine.