[xGrape]

I've finished up a 15 minute project in iMovie (no need to complain about choice of tools, I've fought my way through it). Now I want to publish it to my website, like many of my other movies. Space is not a problem really, I could make it 1 GB in size if I wanted to, but that probably would put many off downloading it.

If I select the "DSL/High" option under "Expert settings" in iMovie export, I get a 225 MB file, and still the quality is horrible when viewed full-screen. I've always wondered how Apple get such good quality on the trailers posted at apple.com/trailers. But at least as long as I use QuickTime for exporting, MPEG-4 is one of the worst formats when it comes to quality vs filesize.

I've thought about DivX, but I would really like something that plays with QuickTime "out of the box", that is, without installing any plugins. Sorenson is an option, but MPEG-4 is what everyone's talking about.

Any tips? What are you using when publishing movies online? And what's a good typical setting for best quality and smallest filesize? Again I'm not looking for small 1 MB clips to attach with emails, but rather HIGH QUALITY MOVIES (not like dvd, but not too far away )

When you can encode a 2 hour DVD into a 700 MB file, that looks ALMOST as good as the DVD - I would like to get my 15 minute movie down to, say 30-100 MB with equally high quality.

All help is highly appreciated

[Axo1ot1]

I usually have good luck with 3ivx. I'm not exactly sure how it works, but if you encode with this codec QuickTime 6 can play it back right out of the box. It yields some pretty clean looking files but keeps the size down. One thing to remember when encoding a file is to compress the audio. A lot of the time QT seems to default to exporting uncompressed audio which can take up a lot of space on a 15 minute file.

Check out the movie section on my website. I think basically everything there is encoded with 3ivx.

[Nap]

You also may want to consider decreasing the frame size and using the Scale statement in html to perhaps double the display size. Full screen is nice but it is a luxory for files that are going to be downloaded. It may be better to reduce the frame and then increase the datarate or, with 3ivx, increase th QP when choosing the Constant Quality option for encoding. Modern codecs seem to often do better upscaling then actually encoding at the larger size.
One other reason for choosing 3ivx is that it allows multi-pass encoding, which may be part of the reason for the quality in the Sorenson3 trailers on the Movie Trailer page. Those are encoded with professional version of SV3 and multi-pass encoding is one of the options that it has that the free Sorenson3 in QT Pro does not have.

[bmhome1]

Give MPEG Works Export to QT application a trial run. It converts with many QT options and makes small files quickly with minimal effort.