EricBall's Tech Projects

Have you tried H264 Lossless ? I think iMovie supports it now..

 

You'll need a monster CPU to compress it in realtime, but even if you couldn't it'll still cut down the file sizes being transported by around 60% over HuffYUV.. Maybe it'd help speed your workflow..

 

I use Lagarith for Archival simply because my sources are 32bit RGB and I've had so much pain trying to make the HuffYUV and H264 Lossless not downsample the Chroma, yet Lagarith just works properly in this regard, and yet comes up with even smaller files then HuffYUV with it's downsampling of the Chroma..

 

Here's an example of some files I've just done this morning:

 

H264 Lossless: 1,896,035,378 Bytes
Lagarith: 5,372,146,372 Bytes
HuffYUV: 5,765,522,476 Bytes

 

The Lagarith file contains raw audio as well, so an additional 280MB over the others which are compressed with MP3 @ 256Kbps..

The sources in this case are RGB, and everything but Lagarith are doing chroma downsampling, which is what makes Lagarith even more impressive So I just use Lagarith for archival purposes and editing, and H264 Lossless for final outputs..

 

Anyway, I only mention Lagarith because I find it a better option than HuffYUV for every purpose..

 

But, and the point kind of, is that I only recently started making use of H264 Lossless, and it is really pretty bloody impressive, making use of the entire arsenal of tools available in the standard, yet still being lossless..

 

 

Anyway, just thought I'd say

iMovie strongly prefers Quicktime supported codecs which are intra-frame only compressed. DV was the lingua-franca of of previous versions and is well supported. Size isn't a huge issue - just buy a larger external disk.

 

However, I am looking at H.264 for the iMovie to iDVD step to keep the size down and the quality up as iDVD wants to use the internal disk. (For some reason, the "export to iDVD" upconverts to 960x540 so iDVD can then downconvert to 720x480.)