[MacDV] Converting QT .mov files to .mpg

[Gregg Gorrie]

on 10/22/03 9:35 AM, Richard Gilmore at rgilmor at uwo.ca wrote:

> We had somebody in who had some video on VHS that she needed captured to be
> used in a Powerpoint presentation on a PC. I used iMovie and had no problems
> making some QT .mov clips about 1 minute each. The QT clip of course wouldn't
> work on her PC so I used Cleaner 6 to convert it to an mpg 2. The only problem
> is that the original QT file was about 500k and .mpg file Cleaner created was
> over 6 megs(!), which was too big. I then made a .wmv file which was about
> twice the size of the QT file and worked fine on her PC. What I'm wondering is
> why was the .mpg file so much larger than the QT file? Is there something I'm
> doing wrong? What would be the best approach to convert a .mov file to .mpg?
> We 
> have a lot of this kind of cross platform issues.
> 
> thanx much
> 
> Richard
> 

iMovie imports video as a DV Stream media file, which is approx.
200MB/minute, so my guess is that your original 500KB QT file was just a
reference file (not self-contained) to the original media. You could export
and compress to Quicktime from within iMovie, but you may have more options
by choosing "Export to Quicktime" and selecting the "Full quality, large"
format (which is DV). Open the file in Quicktime and delete the audio track
if it's not needed. Then take into Cleaner and try saving it as an MPEG 1
file, which is much smaller (per minute) than MPEG 2, but of course lower
quality. I've found the MPEG 1 files to be quite cross-platform compatible.

-- 
Gregg