Compressing Large Video Files, Need Help!

[Zivia]

Greetings all,

This is my first post here at MacRumors so bear with me.

I have used Macintosh computers for several years now and am familiar with the majority of their stock applications as well as many third party developers.

Recently I have been using an application called Screenflow which can be viewed at http://www.telestream.net/screen-flow/overview.htm to capture high definition videos which I then export to FCE. I compile my movie which consists of quite a few clips and then export the timeline straight from FCE. The issue is size. I recorded these clips in 1280x720 and wanted Screenflow and FCE to keep the best quality possible so I made the proper adjustments in export settings to retain the quality. The final result is a forty minute movie that is almost eighteen gigabits. I would like to compress this movie so it is small enough to burn to a DVD. I am aware that applications such as iDVD and Adobe Encore (both of which I have) are designed to create DVD's but I was wondering if there are any other applications out there that can make the movie even smaller while retaining as much quality as possible.

Any and all advice would be much appreciated.

 

[simsaladimbamba]

Final Cut Express normally uses the Apple Intermediate Codec (AIC), which can be set as export codec in ScreenFlow (I use ProRes as exporting codec).
As AIC is an editing codec, the files will be big, and should be, if you want to edit them.
If you would use H.264 as editing codec, for which it is not designed, you can get smaller files, but you will have to render more in FCE.
As you have access to iDVD and Adobe Encore, you should be alright in using AIC for editing and then iDVD or Encore doing the proper transcoding to MPEG-2 material, as that is the codec used for video DVDs.
Btw, if you are running out of storage, why not use external HDDs?

 

[Dave Braine]

It's not so much the file size that matters, rather the length of your movie when burning to a dvd. A one hour movie in iMovie(which use the DV format) is about 12Gb, but will fit comfortably onto a standard dvd when burnt via iDVD, or similar.