Well, yesterday’s filmic experiment was a dud, apparently due to my ignorant choice of media to export the file to. Once, I swear, I had all this stuff down, but it’s been a few years since I needed to whack off a movie clip for download and browser display. I guess I expected iMovie to just take care of that at the media level, but I clearly should have known better. Microsoft and Apple infighting and Apple crippleware strikes yet again!
Just a few moments of Googling would have revealed this page of useful brush-ups on iMovie export formats, which clearly implies that mp4 is not the way to go. It also notes that plain old mpg movies are not supported by iMovie’s export.
Smack! Bad Apple!
The page also notes that none of the default Windows media video formats are supported by iMovie, not a big surprise. To be evenhanded, we’ll turn away from the burning cheek of Cupertino and deliver a satisfying, meaty blow to the unshaven, pale cheek of Redmond.
Smack! Bad Microsoft!
I am sure there are some hoopty-hoops I can jump through here to convert the file outside of iMovie. I actually have both piles of shareware movie-file converters and manipulators and Apple’s prosumer video editing software, Final Cut Express, so I can get thar fum hyar. But I’m trying to think within the box, so to speak.
Pre-iMovie, registering your QuickTime install and coughing up $30 unlocked a raft of video manipulation features that were present by default in any open movie window – some cool, useful stuff, such as resizing, rescaling and cropping, or even rotating the orientation of the video. Either I don’t have a registered copy of QTPro any more, or these features have been disabled. Googling fails to reveal a flurry of squawking users, so it’s probably the latter. Unless it’s just because I was hoping to use these features with MPEGs.
Oh, nooo, it’s not like I would ever want to use these editing features on movie files created by our cameras. Sensibly enough, the manufacturers have selected the MPEG format as the most broadly-supported video-file interchange format. Oh, wait.
That bit up there about never needing to use these features on MPEGs? Strike that. Invert it. Verrrry good. All together now:
Smack! Bad Apple!
At any rate, sorry for the bad asset.
Here is a .mov format file of the film from yesterday. 1 minute, 1.x mb. Sorry QT phobics! Maybe next time. The MPEG-4 is still available, and it looks much better.
The features you are missing in QT Pro are in QTPro – at least, they were when I made my crappy cicada movie this summer. I needed it for the rotate function, paid my 30 clams, and all was golden.
So I think you are in the former, rather than latter, situation there. Or maybe it got whacked in one or another reinstall nightmares… What we do need is registration recovery software, imho.
MPEG-4 is not only has better quality, also much smaller size.