first iMovie production question

[iSaint]

I was videotaped while teaching my English III class as an assessment for my masters course. I'm a total newbie at iMovie. Our librarian used a nice little JVC MiniDV camera, and gave me a firewire plug so I could import it into iMovie. Of course, it imported with no problem...Macs are so great.

I've put together a little project with some fading and some titles, etc. Nothing fancy, though it will be the fanciest thing my teacher has seen. In this work, I've made a 'project' which is default titled 'luke.iMovieproj'. One option is to export to Quicktime. It says it will be a 70-80gb file. However, there is a file already created called 'luke.mov' that is only 312kb on disc, and is the full production. I've played it in Quicktime, and I've uploaded it onto my allotted school webspace, and it downloads and runs fine.

All that for this question: What gives? Is there supporting files that this 312kb file is working off of? Will the 312kb movie work for anyone?

 

[Texas04]

It will only be acesssible to you because that file directs the computer to open files on your own computer. So if another user opens up that same file quicktime will look for the project on their computer and it wont be there.

How long is your movie if I can ask... 70-80GB is rather hefty

 

[trudd]

If you're looking to compress to a small file size, but retain a decent amount of quality, choose Export to iPod. Apple have increased the resolution to 640x480 from 320x240 and it looks great.

 

[iSaint]

Yeah I finally figured out that it was detecting the correct files to play. It's a 36 minute video. The clips are huge, it's like 7gig total or something ridiculous.

Thanks for the tips!

 

[iSaint]

OK so I 'shared' the iMovie project into a Quicktime movie. It's still 2gig or something ridiculous. How can I make the original clips smaller?

 

[eRondeau]

The 312KB file is basically a text "script" file that instructs iMovie how to create your movie -- edits, effects, graphics, etc. It will have additional .dv support files saved that contain the actual video. They will be huge.

And there's nothing odd about 7GB or even 30GB iMovie support files. I made a 30-minute video that totalled about 16GB by the time it was done. But don't worry, it will compress extremely well to fit on a DVD. My 16GB iMovie squeezed into a 3.5GB DVD and it looked perfect. This is that magic that iMovie and Quicktime do so well for us.

 

[eRondeau]

OK so I 'shared' the iMovie project into a Quicktime movie. It's still 2gig or something ridiculous. How can I make the original clips smaller?

Unfortunately there's no free ride when it comes to video compression. You'll have to either reduce the size of the video framing, use a much higher video compression ratio, or reduce the audio quality (stereo to mono). The biggest impact is by making the video frame smaller. However these days a 2GB file is pretty reasonable. Make it perfect and then back it up onto a DVD and you're out less than a dollar.

 

[iSaint]

Thanks for the tips eRondeau. It may be the first DVD my prof gets from this assignment. I was trying to put it up on my web site and let her view it there.

If I re-import the newly created Quicktime movie into iMovie, then 'share' it again, will it decrease the size again?

thanks!

 

[eRondeau]

If I re-import the newly created Quicktime movie into iMovie, then 'share' it again, will it decrease the size again?

You could do it that way, but I wouldn't recommend it. Your best bet is always to go back to the original iMovie and re-export it under new settings. Any time you re-compress an already-compressed video (or .jpeg photo, or .mp3 song) you lose quality quickly. It's always best to start from the original.

Video compression is something of a black art -- even slight differences in the numbers can make a huge difference in the final quality. (I heard the TikiBarTV guys will tell you anything you want to know about the show, except their compression settings... kind of like Colonel Sanders Secret Recipe!) But try a few different settings on your movie and see what ultimately ends up as the best balance between quality and file size.