video for internet

[ambervideo]

I;m trying to compress a video for the web but I'm not sure of what settings to use in Imovie. Can anyone help me out?
The video was recorded at 15fps and the length of it is almost 4min. The dimensions are suppose to be at around 280x360. I need mac and pc friendly versions.
Can anyone give me some tips? There are a whole lot of options in Imovie when compressing video. I've tried many different things and I just get a huge file or a tiny pic with a really bad picture.

Help me please.
Amber

 

[live4ever]

Where is the file from? Is it a movie from a digital camera? iMovie will convert it to DV (over 200MB per minute) and you'll lose some quality with the conversion.

Is the video playable in QuickTime Player? If it is do a command+I and post the info about the video.

 

[Keebler]

flip4mac is your saviour. although, check to see if it works in imovie.

basically, macs are fantastic for all of things, but i've discovered that for good sized, high quality, low file size web compatible videos...they fail.

now before some folks rip me a new one...let's get one thing straight... i love everything about my mac. this i don't, but flip4mac allows me to export right out of final cut. i think you can export out of imovie and then use flip from within quicktime to make your movies.

the result for me, out of fcp, is great videos in terms of file size, screen viewing size, quality and compatibility (flip outputs to wmv).

check it out.

if you plan on doing alot of web videos, then go for it. if not, then try exporting to an ipod video which is a good quality, small file size, but smaller viewing size.

 

[Macnoviz]

About any video you can make with iMovie is Mac and PC compatible, the problem is that Windows users need Quicktime. And some lusers and sys admins are just too stubborn to install anything that doesn't come out of Redmond. So too avoid problems, you need to export to avi, wmv, MPEG-1, anything that will play on WMP. I would recommend WMV, it's the best codec I've ever used for small file sizes.
Or, if you can, you can export to flash, which is also good, and will play on most computers.
If you have acces to a PC, I suggest exporting your movie in full quality to AVI, and then use Windows Movie Maker to export to WMV

 

[whoooaaahhhh]

Pro advice.

For a professionals opinion, and an obviously more expensive solution...I recommend buying a compression suite.

Firstly, you should export your sequence in whatever form you ingested in, DV or whatever. Whatever will keep your video the same, transcoding can be a killer.

Secondly, I'd use a program like Sorenson Squeeze or Discreet Cleaner. These programs are PERFECT for what you're looking for. I have used Cleaner a lot and have a crazy infatuation with it. It will export to pretty much anything and it's stupid easy to use. You can even give it a max file size and it will just fill in the rest (regarding the quality and stuff). Most importantly, cleaner is fast.

I flattened and transcoded a 200MB Sorenson 3 Quicktime video to a 20MB sorenson 3 Quicktime video in under 30 minutes. On a really old G4 with OS 9.2.

Not sure what your market is, but as for deliverables, this is the best option.

EDIT: I would go with Quicktime for quality obviously, but Flash would be the best for compatability. Everyone has flash. If they don't they suck.