Any iMovie HD expert around?

Latte Other Software & Development
1

Hi,

I’ve made a Scrivener screencast about how to export to LaTeX. I’ve made it with Capture Me and did the editing in iMovie HD. The screencast is 4 minutes long and has 22 MB. I think that is too big. I’ve tried a lot of export settings in iMovie HD but this last 22MB Quicktime video was the only export with acceptable image quality.

Is there any expert around who can give me some advice? I googled a little bit and now I fear that it is not so easy to do a good quality screencast with reasonable size.

Any hints?
juh

2

I don’t think 22MB is too big - most folk have broadband these days, even in the UK (which was behind for ages).

Oh, and thanks for taking the time to make a screencast!

Best,
Keith

3

I looked around a little and found that it is way too much.

For example this one is 25 MB for 26 minutes.
omnigroup.purestatic.com/softwar … _intro.mov

I think I will ask them how they did it.

juh

4

I asked quicktime pro and obtained:

[/img]

the secret is in 10 frames/sec and 135 kbits/sec into H.264
hope that helps…
You can also test fotomagico2; the last version allows to export as a standalone player
jl

5

Thanks for this hint. It helped, but I needed patience to encode a video in this way on a PowerBook G4.

The display showing the remaining time increased in the first ten minutes to over 30 minutes and then slowly decreased, when it suddenly finished while there seemed still 10 minutes remaining. I would have boiled my knees, if I had the notebook on them. :wink:

The result is 8MB for 4 minutes and it looks quite good. From some docs on the net I learned that you must carefully select your options from the beginning: from the setting of Capture Me or iShowU to import settings of iMovie HD and finally the export settings.

Needless to say that I did not carefully choosed the right settings, but the result is more or less ok.

You can see it here:
hasecke.eu/Members/juh/scrivener … o-latex-1/

Comments are welcome. I forgot to mention the MMD-settings. :frowning:

Hope that I’ll find the time to correct this.

6

There’s a great little app called iShowU which both makes it easy to create screen casts
(with narration) and produces files of manageable size.

Tim

7

Yeah, iShowU is great. I bought it ages ago with the intention of creating some video tutorials for Scrivener myself, but still haven’t got around to it…
Best,
Keith

8

Just wanted to say a quick thank you to the posters on this thread. I’ve been working on a screencast for Scrivener over the past few days to go with the rejigged product page, and the info here really helped (especially the settings from the OmniFocus screencast that jean-louis posted). Just for my own future reference, and that of anyone who stumbles across this thread, here are the export settings from iMovie HD (I can’t figure iMovie '08 out yet and I can’t be bothered) that got a 13 minute screencast down to 15 megs, with decent-enough quality:

Movie to QuickTime Movie > Expert Settings > Options:

VIDEO

Settings
Compression:	H.264
Frame Rate:	10 fps
Key Frames:	Automatic
Frame reorder:	YES
Data Rate:	Restrict to: 150
Optimized for:	Streaming
Compressor:	Millions of Colors / Best Quality (Multi-pass)

FILTER
None

SIZE
Dimensions:	640 x 480 VGA
Preserve ratio:	NO
Deinterlace:	YES

SOUND

Format:		AAC
Channels	Mono
Rate:		22,050 kHz
Quality:	Normal
Bit rate:	32 kbps

PREPARE FOR INTERNET STREAMING
YES
> Hinted Streaming

As you can see, it’s pretty much what Jean-Louis posted, but it took a lot of playing around with the other settings to get it right - and as juh said, it took ages to render each time: about half an hour on a MacBook Pro with 2 gigs of memory.

All the best,
Keith