iMovie export file size

[farsidecow]

I am trying to do a little movie production in iMovie, ideally to have it exported to a Quicktime movie to share with friends and relatives. It is of my trip to Ghana this past summer. The movie files themselves aren't particularly high quality, they were taken on a Canon PowerShot A75 digital camera, which is fine for still photographs, but not as good on videos. However, it did suffice for the trip, which was mainly archiving things I particularly wanted to remember.

Here's the problem, I'm about halfway into the production and decided to export the file to a Quicktime file to see how it looked out of iMovie. It looked good for what I was using it for, but the file size was nearly 300MB for a movie a little less than five minutes long thus far.

I'm attaching a screen shot of the settings for the movie as it showed in Quicktime. I mainly want to get the file size down as much as I can, while maintaining the integrity of the sound and video, as well as the current dimensions (I can stand to go a bit smaller on this, but I'd really like to keep the dimensions about what they are here).

Any insight or further questions?

 

[Ric]

Hi there,

theres not much more you can do apart from resize it. H264 (as far as I know) is about the best compressor for what you are doing. If you hasn't using H264 the file would be about 10 to 15 times larger !

If you are half way through, then it shouldn't get much bigger than 600MB which will still fit onto a CD.

Video productions get very large... ;-)

regards

Ric

 

[farsidecow]

Thanks. I was just a bit concerned that it would be 1GB on a fairly low quality video .

On a whim, I decided to look at another video I had on my computer in Quicktime format and try and use those compression settings. I managed to shrink the file size to around 100MB keeping the same dimensions and using the default sound settings. The video got a bit grainy, but I think this is a case where I could size the dimensions down a bit.

Any further insight is always appreciated.