Colin and Nick discussed video formats this morning on Twitter. Colin said that “iMovie lags like crazy on H.264 video” which might explain why the transitions in my first commentary didn’t render correctly when I did the voiceover in iMovie, and resulted in the video lagging behind the audio later in the video.
Anyway, I went searching, and found MPEG STREAMCLIP which will convert MP4 files to Apple Intermediate Codec (AIC). A 596MB file became a gigantic 11GB file! I haven’t tried editing a video with transitions yet but hopefully iMovie will perform better.
I do everything in .MOV, I seem to remember reading some things about file formats a few months back that managed to convince me that .MOV was better than MP4.
MPEG Streamclip seems to be the always recommended program on Mac to convert video files. To keep your files to a manageable sizes select the box that says ‘Limit Data Rate’ and put a number around 8000 into the box and you should be fine with quality and file size.
HDPVRCapture exports .m2ts files, which it can convert to .mp4 (h264) files. The clip in the next post was made from that 11GB .mov AIC video but I’ll try edit it later with transitions and see if it performs better. That medic who revived me revived me several other times AFAIR, only for me to die a few seconds later each time. Grrrr.
First time I’d heard of Streamclip, I always used Handbrake but it works really well!
He also DM’ed me on Youtube with more information more relevant to export from eyeTV. You may have missed some of the discussion if you aren’t following JamieEHILLS.
After working with AIC and checking my export/render from last night, I like his recommendations compared to my WAG.
I just edited that 11GB video and I didn’t really notice any difference. Transitions still screwed up while I was doing a voiceover, but otherwise it played much the same, I think. Next video I’ll just import the MP4 and try that. I certainly don’t have the room to have more than 1 AIC clip there at a time!
Yeah, I’m following Jamie too, must read over what he had to say too, all very useful info to know!
My workflow on FCE is better with the changes so I’m happy. Might not work the same in iMovie. Good Luck.
Have you tried ffmpegx? It’s a frontend to ffmpeg, and can convert a huge pile of video formats to other formats. I don’t think it supports AIC though!
I’ve tried ffmpegx in the past. I prefer Streamclip. I just found ffmpegx to not be as user friendly, the UI just seemed really crappy. But this is more of a personal preference issue.