It takes 5 minutes for iMovie to QT export 3min video...!(?)

agent smithagent smith
Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
Hello guys,

I have been using my new iMac for a few days now. It's my first Mac ever and it's G4 800Mhz 256MB 60GB SD. Ok, now for the question... I connected my miniDV Panasonic camcorder via FireWire to my new iMac. Then with iMovie I captured approx. 3min long clip and exported it to QT movie H.263 (usual settings: 320x240, 90KB/s, zero additional filters). It took approx 5 minutes to export the clip... I just wonder if it's acceptable. Sorry guys, but I kinda expected it to be a bit faster... The PC I also own (quite new machine 2.4GHz) is 30% or so faster exporting MPEGS... I know I should buy more (+512MB?) RAM, but the question is whether additional RAM is going to improve it THAT much...

Thanks and looking forward to hearing your ideas, if any.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 2
    ast3r3xast3r3x Posts: 5,012member
    eh not sure but i would like to suggest u ad more ram...its cheap



    www.pricewatch.com
  • Reply 2 of 2
    proxyproxy Posts: 232member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Agent Smith

    3min long clip and exported it to QT movie H.263 (usual settings: 320x240, 90KB/s, zero additional filters). It took approx 5 minutes to export the clip... I just wonder if it's acceptable. Sorry guys, but I kinda expected it to be a bit faster... The PC I also own (quite new machine 2.4GHz) is 30% or so faster exporting MPEGS... I know I should buy more (+512MB?) RAM, but the question is whether additional RAM is going to improve it THAT much...



    Hey, congrats on the new iMac. Really great machine.



    I don't know how familiar you are with the quicktime codecs, there are tons of them.

    I've found that different codecs vary wildly in compression speed..so trying to compare H.263 to mpeg1 is going to be tricky though given that they're completely different. Personally I've found the MPEG4 codec to be much, much faster. My favourite though is the Sorenson 3 but you do have to add a little brightness. using the iMovie default export options is just a start..Try the Expert settings. I'd really experiment with the Sorenson and Mpeg4. For audio I go with Qdesign Music 2 at 16 bits.



    Edit: Extra RAM would be better but I'm not sure ow much it'd speed up compression. Take it to 512 and OS X will be much happier
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