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Apple iMovie 8.0.5 update debuts new iFrame video format - Page 2

post #41 of 57
10/14/09 at 5:12am
Quote:
Originally Posted by souliisoul View Post

Factual links plz to support your comments, so we can read for ourselves.

Surprisingly, they're both right, at least to an extent:

http://www.avchd-info.org/format/index.html

MPEG-4 compression, but held within an MPEG-2 transport stream.
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post #42 of 57
10/14/09 at 5:33am
My 2 cents in bold.

Quote:
Originally Posted by nvidia2008 View Post

That's what's confusing me. Maybe I haven't seen the stats but I thought we were all moving towards 1080i and even 1080p camcorders by now. But I guess people want quick fast and easy so that has gone against the push towards consumer 1080p camcorders.

I think many are surprised at how time consuming and tricky it can be to work with 1080i on the consumer level. I know I was a bit surprised when I got my 1st 1080i camcorder

Maybe most people trying to edit movies on their Vista PCs can't handle 1080i video so that has been a hindrance to better quality video on camcorders.

Not just Vista PCs. Trying to work with AVCHD on anything other than a fairly recent PC can be a problematic proposition.

I mean, 2 years ago we had fairly affordable Sony 1080i camcorders with USB transfer to Mac and PC.

Can someone shed some light on the state of the camcorder world? Maybe the economic sting and shorter attention spans, YouTube, has contributed to a different way people want to record and use video...?

I think you nailed it right on the head IMO. Unless you have a Blu-ray burner, there really isn't any clearly defined way to deliver HD. It's the reason I held off for a while. As of yet, I'm still waiting to see if Apple will do anything with BLu-ray. Otherwise, I'm limited to 720p on my AppleTV, almost any flavor of 720/1080 on my PS3 or Blu-ray format DVDs. Almost none of these are portable so I can share it with friends. That leaves me with uploading to YouTube or Vimeo or my MobileMe page to share my videos

Seems to me like consumer HD has a little ways to go yet.
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post #43 of 57
10/14/09 at 6:16am
Apple still needs to simplify Quicktime conversions which hasn't been accomplished with the new Quicktime. There are too many file formats for iPhone , iPod and AppleTV that are incompatible.
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post #44 of 57
10/14/09 at 6:32am
Quote:
Originally Posted by teckstud View Post

Apple still needs to simplify Quicktime conversions which still hasn't been accomplished . Too many files formats for iPhone , iPod and AppleTV that are incompatible.

You're 0 for 2 in sentence making! Take a deep breath and try again.
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post #45 of 57
10/14/09 at 6:47am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Superbass View Post

You're 0 for 2 in sentence making! Take a deep breath and try again.

Take a chill pill- this is not a grammar class. Is wasn't that difficult to understand.
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post #46 of 57
10/14/09 at 6:51am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Rob55 View Post

My 2 cents in bold.

Seems to me like consumer HD has a little ways to go yet.

Not if you buy a Blu-ray where you get full HD.
Unlike iTunes which calls itself HD but is more like "near HD quality".
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post #47 of 57
10/14/09 at 7:33am
Quote:
Originally Posted by teckstud View Post

Not if you buy a Blu-ray where you get full HD.
Unlike iTunes which calls itself HD but is more like "near HD quality".

I did. I have 2 Blu-ray players (PS3 and standalone). Just haven't gotten one for the computer yet as I've been waiting for Apple to make up their minds as to what (if anything) they will do. I'm eager to see if the new iMacs get a BR option at least. If so, then it stands to reason that the MacPros would get the option as well. Otherwise, I'll be getting a drive from OWC.
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post #48 of 57
10/14/09 at 8:26am
Quote:
Originally Posted by souliisoul View Post

Factual links plz to support your comments, so we can read for ourselves.

Well, just lookup AVCHD, Video Compression and H.264/MPEG-4 AVC in Wikipedia. When you edit video, you do not edit the transport stream, you edit the contained video, which, in the case of AVCHD uses H.264/AVC using interframe and intraframe compression, only the AVC-intra format (as the name suggests) uses intraframe compression only. This means AVCHD video contains a mix of I, P and B-frames which have to be "resolved" (filled-up) by the NLE in order to edit video (e.g. cutting out an I-frame would eventually destroy image information referenced in previous or subsequent frames).
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post #49 of 57
10/14/09 at 8:56am
Quote:
Originally Posted by teckstud View Post

Take a chill pill- this is not a grammar class. Is wasn't that difficult to understand.

That's funny coming from someone who has trolled and complained of trivial grammar before. How soon we forget.
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post #50 of 57
10/14/09 at 10:23am
Quote:
Originally Posted by JeffDM View Post

I dunno, on a consumer HD camcorder, the benefit of recording 1080p seems kind of iffy. I have a couple and the lenses just don't lend themselves to getting good detail at 1080p. Might as well save as 720p and save the drive space and CPU power. If you're using a professional HD camcorder, then you're probably not going to be using iMovie.

Does anyone know if Final Cut Express is a dead product now that Apple seems to be focusing on iMovie for non-pro users? I'd really like to be able to use FCE to import 1080p AVCHD and downscale it to 720p Apple Intermediate Codec for editing (thus saving a ton of space and CPU time), but that doesn't seem to be possible.
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post #51 of 57
10/14/09 at 10:55am
Quote:
Originally Posted by nccyr View Post

Does anyone know if Final Cut Express is a dead product now that Apple seems to be focusing on iMovie for non-pro users? I'd really like to be able to use FCE to import 1080p AVCHD and downscale it to 720p Apple Intermediate Codec for editing (thus saving a ton of space and CPU time), but that doesn't seem to be possible.

Well, the FCE updates have most of the time been months behind the FCP updates. I assume we will see FCE 5 within a few months; the timeline in iMovie is fine for short clips, it is absolutely unusable for longer projects.

If FCE 5 will support 1080p AVCHD or not, I do not know, but looking at the market with 1080p camcorders available for under 400 bucks now, I really see no way how they could not... There are certainly third-party conversion tools that can bridge this gap, e.g. Voltaic HD should be able to help you here.
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post #52 of 57
10/14/09 at 3:58pm
The article says: "The new iFrame format captures standard H.264 video at 960x540, a quarter the resolution of full 1080 HD. The new cameras from Sanyo default to record in the iFrame format, but can also be set to record in full 1080 HD."

So if the Sanyo cameras are recording in full 1080p and saving it as iFrame files, but Apple's iFrame software automatically bumps those files down to one-quarter the file-size (and resolution), and if these are the only people making the iFrame products, what's the point of shooting in 1080p on the Sanyo units in the first place?
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post #53 of 57
10/14/09 at 4:27pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by iedsri View Post

The article says: "The new iFrame format captures standard H.264 video at 960x540, a quarter the resolution of full 1080 HD. The new cameras from Sanyo default to record in the iFrame format, but can also be set to record in full 1080 HD."

So if the Sanyo cameras are recording in full 1080p and saving it as iFrame files, but Apple's iFrame software automatically bumps those files down to one-quarter the file-size (and resolution), and if these are the only people making the iFrame products, what's the point of shooting in 1080p on the Sanyo units in the first place?

It is really not that difficult. Like most HD camcorders the Sanyo models can work in different modes, like 1080p, 1080i, 720p, NTSC, NTSC Widescreen, PAL, PAL Widescreen... depending on the model. If you choose a 1080i/p mode they record 1080 lines, if you select 720p they record 720 lines, etc ad lib.

All the Sanyo models add to this is an iFrame mode, in which it will record only 960x540 pixels and save them using the iFrame format. Once you select iFrame mode, the camera will only capture and save 960x540 pixels, if you select 1080p it will capture and save 1920x1080 pixels but not using the iFrame format...
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post #54 of 57
10/14/09 at 4:45pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by dreyfus2 View Post

Well, the FCE updates have most of the time been months behind the FCP updates. I assume we will see FCE 5 within a few months; the timeline in iMovie is fine for short clips, it is absolutely unusable for longer projects.

If FCE 5 will support 1080p AVCHD or not, I do not know, but looking at the market with 1080p camcorders available for under 400 bucks now, I really see no way how they could not... There are certainly third-party conversion tools that can bridge this gap, e.g. Voltaic HD should be able to help you here.

I thought FCE 4 supports 1080p AVCHD already. I have that kind of a consumer camcorder and it did work when I played with it. Is there some caveat that I missed? The poster merely wanted to save the imports as 720p.
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post #55 of 57
10/14/09 at 4:59pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by JeffDM View Post

I thought FCE 4 supports 1080p AVCHD already. I have that kind of a consumer camcorder and it did work when I played with it. Is there some caveat that I missed? The poster merely wanted to save the imports as 720p.

I use FCP, so I went by the specs (http://www.apple.com/finalcutexpress/specs.html)...

Plus, I read several threads in various forums where people investigated how they can ingest "true" AVCHD 1080p into FCE. What seems to happen is that FCE does import 1080p from some cameras (those internally recording 1440x1080 anamorphic) by converting 1080p with 24 frames/s to 1080i with 60 frames/s. So, this content can be ingested, but you would actually edit it as 1080i60 as FCE does not offer a 1080p timeline.
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post #56 of 57
10/15/09 at 2:38pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by AppleInsider View Post

Digital camcorders began recording in MJPEG (Motion JPEG, a series of still photo captures) before moving to the better compression of the popular DV format. While DV recording allowed for high quality capture, it wasn't optimally designed for direct editing in QuickTime; it uses non-square pixels and is oriented toward TV resolutions and aspect ratios.

What camcorder recorded mjpeg before DV?
Only digital camcorder format before DV was digibeta.

What does it matter that QT was not "optimally designed" for DV?
Non-sq video has been edited with QT over a decade without any problem.
Codec does not even have to know video's AR.

Any real info about iFrame?
Bitrate?
Is it i-frame only?

All I know is that iFrame has pretty good SD resolution with square pixels, which is quite logical today, when all displays use square pixels.
Small consumer camdorder's lens can't resolve 1080p anyway, so why waste storage?
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post #57 of 57
10/15/09 at 8:21pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by dreyfus2 View Post

There are certainly third-party conversion tools that can bridge this gap, e.g. Voltaic HD should be able to help you here.

Many thanks for the tip--Voltaic does indeed do what I was looking for. 90% less rendering in FCE now that all the footage is 720p. I am using FCE with a Canon HF100, and it doesn't have a native 720p mode. I definitely don't need full 1080 for what I'm doing, so downconverting on import saves a huge amount of space and rendering time. Thanks again.
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