[breto]

I decided to take a look at iMovie 2.01 today. I enjoyed playing with it and I think it is great for people that want to create simple movies without hassle.

After the tutorial I opened the clips in Quicktime player and was amazed that the audio alone had a data rate of 3.4MB/sec. The audio was the same size as the video! It captured at 32khz,16bit stereo with the compression reading"DV". This compression is the culprit. When I capture with Premiere, I capture with the same settings except compression is set to None... this gives me a 125k/sec data rate. Big difference.

My question is... is this normal for iMovie? With data rate this size for the audio, you essentially cut the amount of footage you can capture in half.

-bret

Although it looks like the audio consumes an amount of disk space equal to the video, it really doesn't consume any space. What? you say. I found that although it looks like it uses a bunch of space, the audio is really embedded within the video stream for DV video, so the displayed audio size is bogus. How do I know? Well, if you acquire some video, and calculate how large it should be at 3.4 megabytes/sec, then you will find the file is actually that size, and not twice as big.

[breto]

Thanks for pointing that out. In the Get Info palette in QuicktimePlayer, a 7 second clips "reads" a total data size of 50ish MB. That same clip only reads 25MB in the finder. Stange bug.

Thanks again.