Video Settings Export in iMovie

[neonkru]

Hi! I'm new in video editing. I have a canon legria hf200 that shoots video at 1920*1080p

however the standard exports of the imovie have bad quality.

what is the best format to export a movie without losing quality?

If i'm exporting in mpeg4 h264 (which i believe is the best format) what settings and bitrates should i use for 720p and 1080p movies respectively?

thank you for your help

 

[huntercr]

Hi! I'm new in video editing. I have a canon legria hf200 that shoots video at 1920*1080p

however the standard exports of the imovie have bad quality.

what is the best format to export a movie without losing quality?

If i'm exporting in mpeg4 h264 (which i believe is the best format) what settings and bitrates should i use for 720p and 1080p movies respectively?

thank you for your help

What is your output medium? Do you want people to download, or burn to DVD-ROM or play on a PS3 or...?

 

[neonkru]

What is your output medium? Do you want people to download, or burn to DVD-ROM or play on a PS3 or...?

I usually use the settings in my canon hf200 recording at 1920*1080p at either 24mbps or 17 mbps. (mostly 24mbps)

I edit those videos in imovie to make a whole movie from a vacation or something because i don't want to keep the original files (theres a lot of stuff that doesn't matter). So my mainly concern is to keep the iMovie Final editing in maximum quality possible, just like the original. I don't know if that's possible using mpeg4 h264, but i believe it is (or if you recommend another format just tell me=D). I would like to keep the resolution at it's original 1920*1080p.

I usually make a dvd video using the share->export to idvd but, that's for fun, later i would like to be able to burn that stuff into bluray media support because dvd-video doesn't support 1080p quality.

For youtube which settings should i use? thank you for your help and time

 

[neonkru]

so, any help at all?

 

[neonkru]

no one knows how to help?

 

[huntercr]

I usually use the settings in my canon hf200 recording at 1920*1080p at either 24mbps or 17 mbps. (mostly 24mbps)

I edit those videos in imovie to make a whole movie from a vacation or something because i don't want to keep the original files (theres a lot of stuff that doesn't matter). So my mainly concern is to keep the iMovie Final editing in maximum quality possible, just like the original. I don't know if that's possible using mpeg4 h264, but i believe it is (or if you recommend another format just tell me=D). I would like to keep the resolution at it's original 1920*1080p.

I usually make a dvd video using the share->export to idvd but, that's for fun, later i would like to be able to burn that stuff into bluray media support because dvd-video doesn't support 1080p quality.

For youtube which settings should i use? thank you for your help and time

For youtube you ought to google this. There are dozens of walkthroughs and I believe youtube's documentation itself is quite clear.
in general, you want to pick the highest bitrate possible with H.264 that results in a file that is < 1GB. Deinterlace ahead of time also.
I'm not sure if the 1GB limit applies anymore especially for FD content.

Youtube is going to reencode the file anyway.

Here's an article I found that might help:

http://webvideotechniques.com/123/bigger-and-better-encoding-for-youtube-hd

 

[neonkru]

thank oyu for the youtube article. the thing i want to acomplish is the max quality poss for home storage. i don't really need a compact size encoding. i don't really mind about space but for example if a video with a determinate bit rate has the same quality as the video with a higher bitrate then there's no need for that higher bitrate. i wonder what bitrates do users here use for that =P

 

[huntercr]

thank oyu for the youtube article. the thing i want to acomplish is the max quality poss for home storage. i don't really need a compact size encoding. i don't really mind about space but for example if a video with a determinate bit rate has the same quality as the video with a higher bitrate then there's no need for that higher bitrate. i wonder what bitrates do users here use for that =P

In that case, if you want to keep reasonably close to the same quality you started with, you need H.264 @ 24Mbit or 17Mbit.

If you want to keep exactly the same quality, you're going to have it be in AIC or ProRes codecs, which is going to be a far large file than the original unedited source.

There may be an AVCHD editor out there that doesn't require you to recompress the resulting file ( like MPEGStreamclip does for MPEG2 files ), but I've not seen one.

Harddrives are cheap these days... consider backing up to a rotation of haddrives or burn a bunch of DVD-Rs with the original unedited footage.

Also consider this... left in iMovie ( which converts your files to AIC ) you'll get ~20 hours of video on a 1TB drive.
If you save your unedited AVCHD video ( @24Mbit ), you can store ~ 95 hours of footage in the same 1TB.

If I were you, I wouldn't waste the time editing that footage for archive.


Now, if you're wanting to store your final finished edited piece and you want *that*, then consider leaving it in AIC. It will be better quality , but of course it will take up 4 or 5 times the space per minute.

Hope this helps