[calvingrinder]

Here's a puzzle.

If I take 12 jpegs that are in iPhoto (astronomical photos from http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html, avg. 200kb each), and I export them as a Quicktime movie, I get a movie that's about 550kb in size, and it runs great and the images look superb. Movie size is 640x480, duration 22 seconds

If I go to iMovie 2 OSX, and import just two of the same images from my hard drive, and export the two clips as a full quality movie (no audio), I get a movie about 36Mb in size (!) which looks jaggie as heck. Movie size is 720x480 (default selection), duration 10 seconds.

What's happening? I want to put the stills to music, but it won't work if the images are jaggie and soft. I even tried an expert setting, boosting to full quality, but the images still were not as good as the iPhoto export, and there was a "pulsing" effect while each still was playing.

The problem with the iPhoto exports is that I don't have creative control over how it will meld with the soundtrack, and it displays some white space and other junk borders, whereas the iMovie version is nice and black and full frame (just the ticket for space images).

BTW is there a good web site for learning iMovie - Apple's (non) documentation sucks.

thx

cg
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Sold 125,000 iPods (Nov 10-Dec 31,2001)

[ph@lmi.net]

so, are your source images 640x480? iMovie has to stretch the images to fit the 720 pixels.

also, depending on what you use for a CPU, it could be that the DV Streams are fuzzy when playing (on a g3). how do they look if you output them over firewire? better, i'll bnet, but still stretched.

you neglected to mention the quality settings used in your iPhoto exported qt, but it's probably less than 29.97fps. DV uses about 210MB/minute.

but why not do your editing in imovie, then export a full-frame sorenson version with a less hoggish frame rate? after all the images aren't moving. and if you want to be a purist, you can avoid the stretching. by pasting the 640x480 images onto a 720x480 black canvas before importing them into iPhoto.

i would not recommend using a dv editing tool though. after effects it the right tool for this job.

[calvingrinder]

OK now it's getting way over my head.

All I wanted was a movie of these images. When I made a movie out of iPhoto just by clicking a couple of buttons, I thought "hey, what could iMovie do?". Never having used iMovie, I first tried a simple test, which resulted in the "jaggie" results noted.

I looked back into iPhoto, and there are no QT settings other than "width and height" which are defaulted to 640x480.

I looked at some of my images in PS, and it reported:

res 72ppi
627x525
625x502
426x387
( sample wxh of 3 images)

This morning I went back to iMovie, selected just 2 images, changed the size to 640x480, and for laughs changed the colors depth to "millions".

Now I have an even jaggier 4.8 mb movie which pulses about once per second while it plays.

The upshot of this is, I don't know what i'm doing, but the quality of the iPhoto default QT export got me excited about adding music in iMovie and making a production out of it.

The goal is a 4 min. movie for display just on a Mac (or peecee) that would fit on a CD-RW.

My rig is a stock 500Mhz iMac CD-RW running OSX, w/ 1GIG RAM.

Any insight as to why iPhoto can do it but iMovie (at defaults) can't, would be appreciated.

thx

cg

[lucylawless]

iMovie is designed for editing video that will finally be put back onto DV tape. For this purpose, it's standard format is a codec called (surprise) DV. DV takes up a lot of space on your hard drive, and it is just beyond the reach of your processor to play back at full quality. In other words, the movie you made is better quality than what you saw on your screen, but you'll never know until you export it back to tape.

What you want to do is the following. Edit to your heart's content in iMovie. In the export dialogue, choose "to quicktime", and "expert". In the window that pops up, click the "settings" button on the left (image settings). This is where you can play around to find the best compression settings.

On my copy, the default compression codec is NTSC-DV. I've already told you about DV, you don't want it. ph@lmi.net suggested you choose Sorenson. This is a good codec; it's what Apple uses to make all of their excellent quicktime movies you see everywhere (including that annoying splash movie you see when you open iMovie). Unfortunately, Apple uses the $400 (at least) version of Sorenson, and I've never gotten very good results with the free version that comes with Quicktime 5. What I recommend is to go to http://www.3ivx.com/download/macos.html and download and install the 3ivx codec. it will give you excellent compression, and a slide show of a starfield will really let this codec shine. The only drawback is that 3ivx is not yet fully optimized, which means that at high resolutions (like your 640x480), the playback requirements are rather high. If you try 3ivx and it can't play back fast enough, you can try a lower resolution, or instead use the Animation codec in the quicktime export dialogue.

Or, try all the options for compression, and give yourself an idea of how they work. You can ask people all you want, but the best way to get a feel for the right answer is to try things out

[calvingrinder]

Thanks LLL - just the info I think will work.

I'll try it this weekend.

Cheers!

cg
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http://mosquito.paregos.com/mosquito.../indexf2.shtml

[sailor41]

I use IMovie for stills too,and found if I want to burn a CDRom, exporting to Toast vcd (mpeg1) makes a nice small file that plays in most machines. If the movie will live on a fast machine on the harddrive I export full size 640X480 with no compression. Both have their positives and negitives.

The ideal answer will be DVD, when that is affordable. Very close now.

[calvingrinder]

I tried the 3ivx codec this weekend, and it performed well.

The images were still a bit softer than the iPhoto export. I tried a hit of sharpness in PS and that helped.

I'm still amazed at the quality of the output from default iPhoto export to QT; eventually we'll find out exactly what routines it uses. That quality sent me on my quest.

Can't wait to finish the movie now - galactic images set to Ben Fold's "And Not The Same". Cool!

thx

cg

[lucylawless]

ok, so I finally tried iPhoto, and to do exactly what it does, choose Photo-JPEG for the compression. Usually 75% quality in Photo-JPEG is indistinguishable to the human eye, but for a short movie, and if you're not too worried about file size, why not make it 100%.

I'm not exactly sure if iMovie will want to control the framerate of the movie, but you can set that, too in the quicktime export dialogues.

I've a similar experience trying to emulate iPhoto's slide show feature. iPhoto has two slide show features actually. One, which is a realtime slide show, shows the images at full screen, artfully crossfades between images, and lets you play background music; however, there's no option to export or save the show.

The second slide show option is an exportable QuickTime slide show. It merely flips from one image to the next and, by default, doesn't include a track for audio. Boring. Furthermore, when the movie is played back at full screen size with QuickTime Pro, its resolution suffers.

To add music to iPhoto's QuickTime movie there's atleast two ways: You can open an audio file in QuickTime Pro, copy it, and add it to (paste into) the slide show movie after opening it with QuickTime Pro. Secondly, you can use the recently released iPhoto applescripts, one of which allows you to export the slideshow with an audio track.

Incidentally, QuickTime Pro lets you create slide shows too, with audio tracks and colored frames as well. What's lacking are transitional effects—atleast in OSX (plug-ins exist for OS 9's QT Pro).

I tinkered with iMovie too. It's unfamiliar territory for me. I know nothing about codecs which explains why the play-back looked terribly aliased.

Right now, I'd like to know how iPhoto's real-time slide show is able to enlarge 640 x 480 pixel images to fill the screen with virtually no aliasing. Is it converting the (jpeg) file format to a format OSX's Quartz engine favors (i.e. PDF)?