Michael, Thanks for the explanation, I watched (some) of the flashmeeting after it was over and wondered why you would convert such small files to big ones. Your explanation is good.
Chris brought up a good point though, archival is important; how do you archive and manage your clips from the xacti? I have a canon SD800 that takes great video (not so great sound) and have trouble when I want to go back and find footage. How have you been successful at this? -Lan www.LanBui.com -------------------- On Dec 15, 2006, at 3:52 PM, Michael Verdi wrote: Sure - here's why. For whatever reason, Macs suck at editing mpeg4 video. If you try to set up a mpeg4 iMovie project or you change your sequence settings in FCP to match the Xacti settings, I've found it to be very unstable and prone to lots of rendering errors. The easy solution is to transcode the mpeg4 of the xacti to DV. It's pretty simple and you're probably already doing it if you are using iMovie. So in iMovie if you create a new "DV" project (this is the default) and then you drag clips into iMovie you'll notice that iMovie has to "import" them. What it's actually doing is converting the clips to DV. In FCP if you make a new sequence (DV by default) and you put your xacti clips into it they'll have to be rendered. "Rendering" the clips in this case really means converting them to DV. If you want to be really fancy about it you can make yourself a DV preset in compressor and then make that preset a "droplet" with is a little mini application. Then you just drop your clips on the compressor droplet and it will convert anything into DV. On Windows my only experience is with Movie Maker which actually does mpeg4 video quite well. The one deal is that Movie Maker wants .avi files not .mp4 so you have to use a free program called MP4CamToAVI to quickly put an avi wrapper on the files (this doesn't recompress them). Then you can edit them easily in Movie Maker. Actually the best little camera for use with Movie Maker is the Canon Powershots. They make mjpeg clips in an avi wrapper so you can just drag them into Movie Maker and start editing - takes 2 seconds. <plug>BTW, all of that info is in our book - Secrets of Videoblogging</plug> -Michael On 12/15/06, Markus Sandy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > hey michael verdi, > > yesterday in the video conference you mentioned that you convert from > mpeg4 to dv as part of your workflow when using your xacti > > can you elaborate on that a bit more? why and how you do you do that > (i.e., settings)? > > do other folks do this too? > > here's a link to that part of the conference: > > http://flashmeeting.open.ac.uk/fm/memo.php? pwd=59255f-6714&jt=00:20:24 > > thanks > markus > > --- > Markus Sandy > http://feeds.feedburner.com/havemoneywillvlog > http://feeds.feedburner.com/apperceptions > http://feeds.feedburner.com/digitaldojo > http://feeds.feedburner.com/spinflow > > > -- http://michaelverdi.com http://spinxpress.com http://freevlog.org Author of Secrets Of Videoblogging - http://tinyurl.com/me4vs [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
