FlipVideo, iDVD and iMovie... Oh my!

My latest experiment with the Mac has been with videos. I have a lot of video clips of my son that I've taken with my FlipVideo Ultra digital camcorder. I created two DVDs on my Windows PC that are essentially all of the clips strung together one right after another with a basic menu system. It's basic and utilitarian, but with no production value whatsoever. So I thought that I'd start playing around to see what the Mac can do, since this is what seems to set the Macs apart from the WinPCs.

I started by firing up iDVD, and the first thing I noticed is that the level of themes was quite a few notches above what I had available in Windows. Even though these would be out-of-the-box productions, they would still be pretty impressive. I then proceeded to drag in movie clips with reckless abandon to see what would happen. Whereas my Win DVDs would just play clip after clip without stopping, the iDVD build would return to the menu immediately after playing one clip instead of continuing on to the next one. Apparently this is because each movie is treated as a separate "title", so like when you put in an Iron Man DVD, it plays the movie "title", and when it's done, it returns you to the menu. As it turns out, what I was wanting was for the individual clips to be treated as "chapters". This is where iMovie comes in.

With iMovie, you basically edit together all of your video clips into a single movie. You can add transitions from clip to clip, on-screen titles, title overlays, and even throw in a soundtrack if you like. It also allows you to insert Chapter points as well as name them, which is really handy as I will describe later.

Now the problem that I had with iMovie was that it would not recognize the FlipVideo AVI files, even though they played just fine in QuickTime Player. The FlipVideo uses the 3ivx codec, but from what I've read, it uses a modified version of the codec, which would explain why QT can play the files but iMovie can't import them. I decided not to install the FlipVideo version of the codec because as you'll recall from my previous post, it caused problems with other video playback. So what to do?

Behold HandBrake, a video conversion utility. Using HandBrake, I converted all of the video files into MPEG4 videos using the h.264 codec, which should make iMovie happy. The interesting thing is that the first time I converted a file for testing, it gave the file a .mp4 extension, which iMovie found without any problem. The next time I converted a file, iMovie wouldn't import it, because it had a .m4v extension, which is apparently what iTunes likes. I changed the extension to .mp4, and iMovie found it just fine. So as I converted all of my files, I had to make sure to change the extension to .mp4 in order for iMovie to see them.

The other quirk about HandBrake is that it automatically crops your videos, which is not really what I wanted. So another thing I had to watch was to make sure the output file was also 640x480. If not, then I had to go into the Picture properties, change the cropping to custom, and zero out all the values.

Having done all this, I finally had all of my video clips converted to .mp4 and imported into iMovie. Looking back on it, I probably should have converted them at 100% quality to minimize any degradation due to compression, but so far the clips seem to be perfectly fine. If anything, some of the grainier clips seem to be smoother after the conversion. I would like to think there's some way to set the defaults, but I haven't taken the time to track it down.

So back to iMovie. The final element of having converted all of the video clips is that they do not have the actual date and time stamp for the videos. Fortunately, iMovie allows you to change these so that they appear in order of when they were recorded. Yes, this is all tedious, and yes, I would prefer not to have to do it, but that would involve installing the FlipVideo 3ivx codec. I may do some additional testing in the future. Either that, or I'll use it as an excuse to upgrade to an HD camera like the MinoHD or the Kodak Zx1, but I need to do more research on those and what codecs they use. While I like the FlipVideo Ultra's overall performance, the codec issue does make this whole process more tedious. (Okay, so now I'm installing the current FlipVideo 3ivx codec, are you happy?)

I'm not going to bore you with what I did within iMovie, but suffice it to say that it a) is fairly intuitive, b) looks VERY professional, and c) pretty easy to use. I even built a decent facsimile of the Star Wars opening titles using the Far Far Away title template. How could I not? As soon as I saw that template, I knew I was going there, and you know you would, too. So having completed my movie, complete with titles, transitions, and chapters, I told it to share the movie to iDVD, and it started rendering. About 3 hours later, it arrived in iDVD, where I applied a DVD theme and found my movie, scene selection submenus, and everything ready to go. I edited some of the chapter titles so they would fit onscreen, and saved the project to a DVD image, which took about 2 hours to encode.

I mounted the DVD image and launched DVD Player, and I was very disappointed to find that the title text was EXTREMELY pixelated. Imagine playing a modern video game at full 1980x1200 resolution only to find the in-game text to resemble that of the Atari 2600 console instead. Back to Google! From what I read and assuming I understood everything that I read, what happens is that when iMovie shares to iDVD, it will render and encode everything for DVD, which then happens again when iDVD preps the image. The recommended method is to save the movie using the Export Movie command, which saves it as a .m4v file. Then open iDVD and drag that .m4v file into iDVD.

I created a test movie, dragged it into iDVD, and it automatically created all the same movie and scene selection menu items and submenus just like when I shared directly from iMovie to iDVD. Next, I saved the project to a DVD image, and when I opened the new image in DVD Player, all the title text looked significantly better.

Now that I have the FlipVideo 3ivx codec installed, it's time to go see if iMovie can use the FlipVideo files directly. That would certainly save a lot of time.