iMovie: help converting mini DV to .avi

[Blunted Monkey]

Please help!

I've imported video from my camcorder into iMovie.

I now want to convert this video into .avi format with NO loss in quality.

The first time I tried on expert settings with 24 frames and 1000 Kb/sec and got a very dark and blocky result.

The second time I tried with no compression at all and the result was a huge file (30gb) that none of my media players seemed to be able to play longer than 30 sec.

The source video I am converting is about 3gb.

Working with iMovie 4.0.1 and a 1.6 GHz PPC G5 with 768MB DDR SDRAM and plenty on HD space

I have full length feature films in .avi format that are under 1gb....please help me get MY video to compress like that!!!

 

[spinnerlys]

iMovie won't do that for you so easily, as .avi files are not really its thing.

Note that a DV encoded movie (a movie captured from miniDV tape) will take up 12GB/h (3.25MB/s).

The .avi files you mention use another codec, as the codec does all the work, and not the suffix (.avi). An .avi files is only a container for video and audio (AVI - Audio Video Interleave) encoded with many different codecs.

If you want a space efficient .avi file, you can use the Divx codec, and once installed, you can also use MPEG Streamclip to make an .avi file, which will be much smaller.

You have to export the sequence you put together in iMovie in a good quality, if possible the same as the source (DV) and then use that big file (ca. 223 MB/min) to encode the movie into an Divx .avi file via MPEG Streamclip.
In MPEG Streamclip you will have to adjust some settings like quality and such.

Here might some help on the settings:

 

[Blunted Monkey]

Thank you so much for the quick response!

I have downloaded MPEG Streamclip and am trying your suggestion now.

Keeping my fingers crossed that this works out.

Thanks again!

 

[arjen92]

What you also could do is;

1) install perian to make quicktime read .avi's (you probably already did that)
2) export the movie normally on high settings
3) download handbrake
4) convert the movie with handbrake to .avi

You can set the size of the .avi and the quality is pretty good (I noticed no difference, but I'm not that picky).