Greetings,

1) I need an advice on best way to export a movie from iMovie to Quicktime and then
to a format that can be read by both
Mac and PC. What is the best CODEC to use?

2) Also, whenever I try to export a movie to Quicktime in iMovie, it takes a whole day or
sometimes even longer. Is this normal?

3) What is the easiest DV editing program
to use to edit and archive movies that can
be read by Mac and PC on a CD-ROM?

Your help will be really appreciated.

[Simon Kornblith]

1) QuickTime is available for Windows. It has capabilities to play any movie that can be played on a Mac. http://www.apple.com/quicktime/

2) This is normal. It takes a long time to export files using the Sorensen Video or QDesign Music codecs.

------------------
Simon Kornblith
Computer Consultant
Programmer

[Millennium]

1) I'd recommend MPEG. It's got good compression rates, great quality and plays on almost anything out there (MacOS, Windows, Linux, BeOS, OS/2, and half a billion others).

2) Depends. How fast if your machine, what codec are you using, and how big is the movie (length, screen size, and FPS)? Sorenson and MPEG are particularly notorious for taking a long time to compress.

3) Can't really help you; iMovie and Final Cut Pro seem to work the best for raw DV (unfortunately you can't easily edit MPEG since it's a streaming format).

For converting to MPEG, you have basically three choices that I know of. Astarte's M.Pack is expensive, but it's the best out there that I know of. Astarte's MPEG Exporter is far less expensive, but it's a lot slower. Finally there's Movie2MPEG, a small Open-Source program. It's about as fast as MPEG Exporter, but a bit buggier at lower bitrates. However, it does get the job done.

[Feathers]

Depending on HOW cross platform and backwards compatible you want to be:

a) Cinepak is supported through Quicktime and as an AVI codec, you could also use Indeo3.2 or 4 of whatever comes with the latest version of IE. You can also go to: http://www.terran.com/CodecCentral/Codecs/index.html

b) A big movie will take a long time to compress. One hint - turn off any screen savers as they rob cycles (heavily) from the processor whilst you are compressing. If you're worried about your desktop, you could create a special theme for compression work with a black background, you can also get Desktop Magician from www.alladinsys.com/ which will allow you "hide" desktop icon's etc. Also how long a movie, is taking how long to compress? - It may NOT be normal.

3) There is easy and there is inexpensive, which are two different things. Many editing packages don't support DV - Premier 5.1c does as does StrataVideo4.5 onwards. Stratavideo comes free with the XLR8 Interview for a total cost of $79 - take a look. I'd suggest trying some magazine coverdisk demos before committing to a package. Workflow issues vary greatly from package to package and although one is very much as good as another, you may absolutely HATE using some of them, and it's important when you can spend a lot of time with an editing package. Personally, I like Premier 4.2 more even than 5.1c that's how deep preferences can go, but I use a number of different packages for different things.

[Feathers]

Forgot to mention, if you haven't already, upgrade to Quicktime 4.1.2PRO it's well worth the $29, as a matter of fact, QT4Pro is probably the simplest editor you can get. I'd also recommend getting a copy of the VisualQuickstartGuide to Quicktime4Pro ISBN -0-201-35493-4 it's very useful, especially if you have bad memory, like me

PS - Wait for the echo!