iMovie video file formats

What would be the best format to save a file from iMovie in terms of video quality? There's a massive list and to save going through each one and asking I thought I'd see if there was any video experts on here.

Liam

DV stream will net you the best quality, but will be a huge file.

What is the final output? Web? TV?

Liam said:

What would be the best format to save a file from iMovie in terms of video quality? There's a massive list and to save going through each one and asking I thought I'd see if there was any video experts on here.

Liam

Click to expand...

I tend to choose Quicktime, when you click Share, it will give you the drop down menu, choose Expert settings, then you can click the options in the window that will come up when you click share (maybe save) again, you can set extension type, depending on what you pick there you can set aspect ratios, audio quality, etc.

Just play with the different options on a short clip, 3 or 4 minutes, see how the clip looks, and check the file size. This will give you a feel for what you should do with the final product.

Best,

Brian

surfwax95 said:

DV stream will net you the best quality, but will be a huge file.

What is the final output? Web? TV?

Click to expand...

Well I have to present it to an audience, so it'll most likely be on a DVD so file size isn't an issue, I just need the quality to be high.

The only issue I have with *.DV is whether I will have any playing issues? Will Windows Media Player play it (Windows computers at Uni), or is it only Quicktime?

Well, export the project to iDVD, and burn it with iDVD. This should make a generally playable DVD, and it will adjust the quality settings accordingly so that it fits onto the DVD.

Once done, take a look at it.

You can also click the Quicktime option in share, and then choose the Divx format (.avi) and adjust the settings. As long as the windows machine has the divx/xvid/avi codecs on it, should work okay.

I think you can also export as mpeg and multiple other exensions that should move over to windows without too much hassle, but if you are going to use DVD I'd try the export to iDVD route. Should be plenty of tutorials on how to do it out there. But I imagine that since it's OS X, it's basically point and click.

Interested to know how it goes,

Brian