HD Video Converting

[mildj84ns]

Hallo, I'm a newbie here, so first i just wanna say hallo to all of you.

I have a MacBook Pro, on which i have installed OS X and Win Xp, i also have a Sony HDR-SR7E camera. I transfer my videos, in Win Xp, via Sony Motion Picture Browser, on OS X, via iMovie '08, the videos are in 1920x1080px resolution, so here's the problem, when i transfer the video via imovie, the size of a video gets bigger over five times then the one transfered by Sony Motion Picture Browser, but those files can not be played with any player, but the Sony AVCHD Player, with imovie i can play it with any player, 'cause it converts files in .mov format, but like i said, it's much bigger files.
So, my question is, is there some universal file converter which allows converting without drastic increasing of a file size or lose of a video quality?
And another one, are the files converted in imovie from 1920x1080 resolution to imovie large format (960x540px), show poorer quality played on a HD TV.
Many Thanks.

 

[mrgreen4242]

Hallo, I'm a newbie here, so first i just wanna say hallo to all of you.

I have a MacBook Pro, on which i have installed OS X and Win Xp, i also have a Sony HDR-SR7E camera. I transfer my videos, in Win Xp, via Sony Motion Picture Browser, on OS X, via iMovie '08, the videos are in 1920x1080px resolution, so here's the problem, when i transfer the video via imovie, the size of a video gets bigger over five times then the one transfered by Sony Motion Picture Browser, but those files can not be played with any player, but the Sony AVCHD Player, with imovie i can play it with any player, 'cause it converts files in .mov format, but like i said, it's much bigger files.
So, my question is, is there some universal file converter which allows converting without drastic increasing of a file size or lose of a video quality?
And another one, are the files converted in imovie from 1920x1080 resolution to imovie large format (960x540px), show poorer quality played on a HD TV.
Many Thanks.

When iMovie transfers AVCHD video in from a camera it converts it into Apple Intermediate Codec. AVCHD records at 13mbits per second, AIC is much larger than that (as you've noticed), somewhere around 110mbit/sec.

AIC stores each complete frame as a full frame, whereas AVCHD stores key frames (full frames) only every 15 or so frames. The rest are stored as only the difference from the key frame and are rebuilt on the fly during playback. This makes for great compression and doesn't effect playback, but it's a bear to edit. The editor can't cut anywhere but the keyframes.

What you can do, though, is import a batch of video to iMovie, edit it however you want and then export it back to h.264 which will look very good still and be much smaller. You can even get it small than your original AVCHD by using two-pass compression to maximize quality with a small bitrate... not sure if iMovie will do that for you on it own, though. You may need to export it from iMovie as an AIC or other very large, high quality video and then run it through an external compressor.

 

[mildj84ns]

When iMovie transfers AVCHD video in from a camera it converts it into Apple Intermediate Codec. AVCHD records at 13mbits per second, AIC is much larger than that (as you've noticed), somewhere around 110mbit/sec.

AIC stores each complete frame as a full frame, whereas AVCHD stores key frames (full frames) only every 15 or so frames. The rest are stored as only the difference from the key frame and are rebuilt on the fly during playback. This makes for great compression and doesn't effect playback, but it's a bear to edit. The editor can't cut anywhere but the keyframes.

What you can do, though, is import a batch of video to iMovie, edit it however you want and then export it back to h.264 which will look very good still and be much smaller. You can even get it small than your original AVCHD by using two-pass compression to maximize quality with a small bitrate... not sure if iMovie will do that for you on it own, though. You may need to export it from iMovie as an AIC or other very large, high quality video and then run it through an external compressor.

Thanks.