Tips and tricks for video handling

In this post­ing, I have col­lected quite many tips and tricks that I use for video edit­ing and for video for­mat con­ver­sion. I used to have lots of “Stick­ies” on my desk­top, but decided to move them away from there, and why not to my blog page.

Make mp4 m4v and ogg for streaming

1. Export from iMovie as Medium
2. Con­vert using ffm­pegX to get down the bitrate to 500. This will stream well well enough for most users and it is slightly lower than what money sites are using so it’s save. Con­vert using the H264 codec to get an mp4,

Maybe it does not work to export from ffmpegX。If so, some more pro­gram should be run after to pre­pare for stream­ing. It actu­ally seems SAFER to use MpegStream­clip instead, makes mp4‑s that play with iPhone directly. I should find out…

Create OGG Video file from an mp4 file

In ter­mi­nal, type ffmpeg2theora XXX.m4v. This will put an OVG file right next to the mp4 file. Wow!!! Quite messy to install ffmpeg2theora, but pos­si­ble. This is nice to have and it’s nice to pub­lish OGVs because it a FREE format.

Ripping ANY DVD into to Apple TV

1. Play with DVD player and push TITLE in the counter win­dow to find out which “chap­ter” the movie is actu­ally run­ning on.
2. Hand­brake — select only the “chap­ter” found with DVD player, usu­ally one of the largest files.
3. Dou­ble click to  import to iTunes and to Apple TV. Note that if you want to chance the poster, the whole move will be synced again so if pos­si­ble, set it before immur­ing to iTunes.

Until now, ALL DVDs could be ripped, includ­ing Dis­ney. Great for my kids who have destroys lots of DVDs. Now we don’t need them any­more. Just for the notes, one hour equals about one GB.

Another, not as safe way of getting DVDs into Apple TV

1. Mac the rip­per, saves into VIDEO_TS folder.
2. Toast the VIDEOT_TS folder to Apple TV, iTunes.
3. Clean up chap­ters with SimplMovieX
4. Optional: Toast a disk image of the VIDEO_TS folder.0

I have failed with some DVDs using this method.

Con­vert DVD to mp4 for iPod

1. Use Hand­brake, using the pre­de­fined formats.
2. Use Sim­ple­MovieX if there is a need to add chapters

 

Chapter in iMovie

Don’t put ant num­bers on in the text describ­ing the chap­ters. AppleTV will put num­bers there itself.

Compress a DVD from “9 to 5”

There are “dou­ble den­sity” DVDs that can fit up to 9 Gb. Bet­ter way — use Toast. Poor man’s way: com­pres­sion to a 4.7 Gb disc from Ubuntu:

1. Con­nect the DVD or DVD-image to the VM
2. Open a ter­mi­nal and run dvd95, skip the view­ing of files
3. Copy the com­pressed file to the OS X.

 

Import from Sony HD camera: Large or full size?

The video was 10 Gb in the cam­era, good com­pres­sion. When I cov­ered to full size, it became 200 Gb. When I con­verted to large size, it was 30 Gb. I could not notice any dif­fer­ence at all, so after that, I have always used “large”.

 

Setting the menus in iDVD

It is best to use the gray scheme because stills can be pasted there after con­trol cli­cling on the menu picure of the chap­ter. Then an Inspec­tor win­dow will appear that can be used to get a still pic­ture. Nice. After this, other shemes can also be selected and then they will inheirit the cor­rect still instead of mov­ing pictures.

iDVD “multiplexer error” when sharing from iMovie.

To avoid this:

• Make sure that the SCREEN SAVER is off. In “Energy Saver” set the com­puter to be always on. (Tem­porar­ilt).
• Make sure to save the iDVD project on the startup drive.
• Save the disk image to the startup drive, for exam­ple to the DESKTOP
• Don’t put a chap­ter marker at the very begin­ning of you DVD? Don’t!!
• Don’t mess around too much and it will be OK.

Things I tried that did not help:

• delet­ing library/caches/com.apple.idvd (folder)
• delet­ing library/preferences/com.apple.iDVD.plist.
• Advanced > delete Encoded Assets
• Advanced > Encode in Back­ground  (was grayed out, so I did­n’t need to turn off)

Pro­cess­ing the project in iDVD took 6 hours, so I went to bed. When I woke up I had success.

Create Flash Video from iMovie or from a WMV file

• Con­vert high res­o­lu­tion wmv in mpg stream­clip. Use Quick­time,  Apple BMP,  and spec­ify 1440x1080.
• Import to imovie. WORK!
• Export from iMovie “Medium” class to make a m4v that is 640x480. Also DV has been work­ing well as a start­ing format.
• Use ffm­pexX to con­vert to FLV.
• Tun­ing of bitrate and frame rate can be a good ting. 500 seems to be good num­ber. 640x480/ NTSC29.97 (makes about 4 Mb per minute)
• Finally, run yandi avail­able for most OSes. This will set the head­ers right in the FLV.