Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

How does everyone output their video footage

S

san001

macrumors member
Original poster
Mar 5, 2014
60
1
Hi
I have just purchased a refurbished imac and as it does not have a DVD which has made me think about how i output my video.

i just like to edit home family videos and currently transfer them onto a DVD so that i can watch them on TV , however what is the way forward in doing this other than a DVD as i have no idea?
 
Trim, snip, splice, edit. I try to keep under 60seconds because 1. unlimited space on Picasa, 2. most people don't have that long of an attention span anyway.

1. Upload to Picasa (emergency fallback if lose #2) also easy to Airplay from Web Albums app to AppleTV, also to share.
AND
2. Upload to a WD MyCloud on fathers 100/100 fiber connection. Easy and fast to recover or share full quality.

I can keep tons of 1080P 18mbps <60 second videos on my local storage in iTunes with no sweat.
 
Last edited:
Menel said:
Trip, snip, edit. I try to keep under 60seconds because 1. unlimited space on Picasa, 2. most people don't have that long of an attention span anyway.

1. Upload to Picasa (emergency fallback if lose #2) also easy to Airplay from Web Albums app to AppleTV, also to share.
AND
2. Upload to a WD MyCloud on fathers 100/100 fiber connection. Easy and fast to recover or share full quality high quality.

I can keep tons of 1080P <60 second videos on my local storage in iTunes with no sweat.
Click to expand...

My family videos end up being an hour say per holdiay of AVCHD (HD) files, therefore just one of these that i input onto the computer would probably fill up all the space.
 
If you are serious about backing up, you already have another HDD to backup your data to, thus getting another HDD to store videos for the Apple TV on should not be that much of a problem, and in the long run will be cheaper than burning DVDs, as they expire sooner than HDDs, since most people do not store them that well.
 
san001 said:
My family videos end up being an hour say per holdiay of AVCHD (HD) files, therefore just one of these that i input onto the computer would probably fill up all the space.
Click to expand...
But does anyone ever sit down and watch and HOUR of a homevideo? That's seriously seriously bore fest. A AAA feature film with action and story... sure... home videos are not. I'm sure as hell not sitting down to an hour of that of my own kids, much less anyone elses. uggggh

I make a intro spashscreen brief, and 2-3, 5-25 second intervals of highlights.

On rare occasions a video will be upto 3mins. With 5-6, 15-25 second segments.
 
simsaladimbamba said:
If you are serious about backing up, you already have another HDD to backup your data to, thus getting another HDD to store videos for the Apple TV on should not be that much of a problem, and in the long run will be cheaper than burning DVDs, as they expire sooner than HDDs, since most people do not store them that well.
Click to expand...

So if i understand this correctly (sorry this is all new to me), if i edited my video in say imovie , I would then be able to watch the finished results via an Apple TV on my TV from my external hard drive?

Is that the gist of it?

Would a 1TB Ext HDD, hold a lot of HD video?

----------
Menel said:
But does anyone ever sit down and watch and HOUR of a homevideo? That's seriously seriously bore fest. A AAA feature film with action and story... sure... home videos are not. I'm sure as hell not sitting down to an hour of that of my own kids, much less anyone elses. uggggh

I make a intro spashscreen brief, and 2-3, 5-25 second intervals of highlights.

On rare occasions a video will be upto 3mins. With 5-6, 15-25 second segments.
Click to expand...

Yes, we would and do, to many memories not to capture.
 
san001 said:
Would a 1TB Ext HDD, hold a lot of HD video?
Click to expand...
It depends. Primarily on bitrate.

If you trim the fat out down to neat highlight vids. It will hold many many years worth.

A one minute highlight film is about 400MB.
A 1TB harddrive will hold ~2300 of these.

4 at christmas, 3 at thanksgiving, 4 on a vacation. And an extra twice a month an extra 24 a year. About 35/yr. Decades of video on a 1TB drive.
 
san001 said:
So if i understand this correctly (sorry this is all new to me), if i edited my video in say imovie , I would then be able to watch the finished results via an Apple TV on my TV from my external hard drive?

Is that the gist of it?
Click to expand...

You'd be able to watch them on your TV, through the Apple TV, which is streaming them from your computer that has an external drive attached to it.

Just wanted to avoid any confusion if you had possibly thought the external drive could attach directly to the Apple TV.
 
External hard drives are a great solution. They are cheap nowadays for lots of storage. Once you fill one up, just buy another and label them. No need to "trim the fat" - storage is cheap. Your movies should be as long as you want them :)

Also, you can purchase an external DVD burner (relatively inexpensive) and keep making DVDs, there's no issue with that. I understand you're looking for other solutions, but just wanted to mention that.
 
If you really want optical media, just purchase an external DVD/Blu-Ray burner. I used to do this for years, but now I put everything on a 4TB USB 3.0 drive and play the files using my WDTV Live. I'd like to have an AppleTV box too, I'll probably get one later this year.
 
san001 said:
My family videos end up being an hour say per holdiay of AVCHD (HD) files, therefore just one of these that i input onto the computer would probably fill up all the space.
Click to expand...

Can't you edit this footage down to something reasonable? Learn how to edit to tell a story. Maybe you can cut the 60 minutes down to three shorter shows. Watching raw camera footage is painful.

Also your plan to convert to DVD throws away a lot of video quality. a DVD can only hold "standard definition" video but your camera is recording in HD.

DVD is also no a good storage media, they don't last so long. Hard drives are cheap now, well under $100 per TB. Buy a few disks
 
san001 said:
Would a 1TB Ext HDD, hold a lot of HD video?
Click to expand...


As a rough estimate, figure that one DVD holds about 800MB of data and easy fits a one hour movie. Call it one GB for Hollywood feature film

Next, remember that there are 1000 GB in each TB. So the $80 disk drive can hold 1,000 Hollywood feature films at DVD quality.

But actually H264 is slightly better and can hold HD quality in about the same space.

So if you shoot 1 hour of footage per year and edit it down and compress it to 1GB/hour you can store 1,000 years of video on one disk.

What I would suggest is shoot a lot more. Try for 10 to 20 hours of raw footage. Be sure and get "B Roll" stuff and subjective shots and continuity of direction and the like then edit down to MUCH shorter length segments using maybe 10% of the best of what you have.

I tend to keep about 1/5th of what I shoot. My daughter with zero training has taken up You-tubibg and seems to keep about 1/4. I do many re-takes always trying for a better shot or a better performance.

Just do NOT worry about the cost of hard drive storage. What you want is to give who ever is going to do the editing a huge about of options and a lot of footage to work with. Read any book on film making to see what kinds of shots editors need.
 
I save my Movies to BluRay images. Then copy them to my NAS when done. This means that I can play them on any computer in the house (can use VLC on Macs) and if I need to give a copy to someone, I can just burn it to disc.

If you keep the video under 1 hour, you can burn to double layer DVD. But while any computer can play this, if you set the bitrate too high, not all BluRay players will be able to play them.
 
Thanks for all help, i definitely want to get away from saving onto DVD.

I played around with iMovie today for first time, and tried to save the file to my external hard drive, but it kept failing, so ended up saving on computer.

I looked at some posts on this and got a little confused (again my knowledge limited), do i have to buy a dedicated external hard drive especially for a MAC, my current 1TB drive does say it is compatible.

Any advice or recommendations on any is appreciated as want to start saving all home video on here (i gather that the imported video and the final output from iMovie all would go on here?)
 
san001 said:
... do i have to buy a dedicated external hard drive especially for a MAC...
Click to expand...


I would think if you shoot video you'd want to buy several external drives.

1) Time machine needs an external disk that is about 2x or 1.5x larger then all the data you have or will have on the Mac. Leave this connected 24x7 and let Time machine run.

2) You also need a backup disk to hold data that you do not want to loose. Store this disk as far away from the Mac as you can, in another building is best.

3) If the data are really important one more copy is required. or use an on-line backup service like Backblaze or Crashplan.

So the answer is "Yes at LEAST one."
 
san001 said:
I looked at some posts on this and got a little confused (again my knowledge limited), do i have to buy a dedicated external hard drive especially for a MAC, my current 1TB drive does say it is compatible.
Click to expand...

There is no such thing as a "mac Harddrive." Manufacturers just slap that on boxes so that they can charge $50 - $100 more for it. Harddrives are all completely the same, they have no idea what operating system they are attached to. Formatted partitions, on the other hand, do. "Mac Harddrives" are just HDD's that come pre-formatted for mac. Taking 10 seconds to reformat can save you a bunch of money.

Buy whichever drive you want, plug it in, open up Disk Utility and Format the drive as Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back