imovie question (1 Viewer)

[taubstumm]

what i have: some video clips, shot on a digital stills camera, as .avi files.

what i want: to combine some of these clips together into a single file, without losing quality, but without getting monster file sizes either.

for example, if i have three .avi clips of 5mb each, can i create a combined version of all three that's a 15mb .avi file? seems to be tricky.

the process of importing the stuff into imovie and prepping it is all fairly idiot-proof. the difficulty is in exporting it. you get the option to compress the movie in different ways.

the basic options all crunch the file to tiny sizes. the default 'full quality' option exports the clip as .mp4, which i suppose is ok, but i'm worried that i'm losing quality.

then there's 'expert settings', which has all the options, but it's for, well, experts.

any obvious route or 'standard' expert settings i can use?

thanks.

 

[HMD]

you could do it in quicktime pro easily enough. copy from one clip and paste into the other, then save.

 

[Goodbye]

VisualHub will stitch them together for you.

Its not made anymore but you can easily still get it elsewhere. (And for this very reason its not made anymore)

 

[pavlos]

VisualHub will stitch them together for you.

Its not made anymore but you can easily still get it elsewhere. (And for this very reason its not made anymore)

(Whistles) http://tinyurl.com/mw2k5p

 

[Goodbye]

see

 

[taubstumm]

thanks for those, but can i do it in imovie? which is the crappy software that i already have? i would've thought it was a fairly normal and standard thing to want to do.

 

[Goodbye]

You can, but you did say: "but without getting monster file sizes either" hence the suggestion of VisualHub.

'sides I don't think iMovie will allow you to place different video formats on the same timeline.

also, you gave a shitload of reasons why you cant do what you want to do in iMovie in your first post.

"i would've thought it was a fairly normal and standard thing to want to do" - iMovie and all the iLife thingamabobs are HUGELY limited. They are bundles with macs to give everybody with a mac the ability to do very basic things live video editing, photo organization, hell even writing music, but when you want to do something a bit specialist then you HAVE to use specialty software.

You're first post outlines the limitations of what you are trying to achieve in iMovie.