[fccabs]

Hi folks Im desperate for help before i finally lose it and smash my mac book pro to bits in frustration. I'm trying to turn a video i've taken into an AVI file so i can send it to my nephew for editing and and i'm having real problems with it. I've done this before on a windows machine and not had any problems but my mac is totally doing my head in. I can import it into Imovie easily enough but when i try and export it as an AVI file I start having problems. The video is shot in widescreen so in order to keep the 16:9 aspect ratio I have to export from Imovie using the expert settings as all the standard settings export in full screen. I've tried exporting in with various different settings and I keep getting the same problem which is that when i play the file using quicktime or real player it only plays the first 3 minutes even thought the video itself is much longer. However when i play the file using mplayer it plays the whole video!! Im very confused by this and have no idea if i give the file to my nephew whether he'll get the whole video or just the first 3 minutes. Has anyone come across this before??? Any help or suggestions greatfully appreciated. Im trying to the video into an AVI file as its my understanding that this will be the best quality for future editing and that AVI files work on both macs and PC as i don't know what type of machine will be used for the final editing. Are there any other formats that are as good as AVI and work on both machines????

[Serge_N_Gin]

Try playing the exported file using VLC (there is both a Mac/PC version so compatability is no issue)

VLC (linky) can play just about anything thrown at it.

I realise this doesn't help explain why you are having the issues you are, but view it as a workaround until someone steps up to further explain what's actually taking place here ...


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[TD912]

AVI is a container format, and there are many different codecs for it. You can make Xvid, DivX, Cinepak(really old), MJPG, and even uncompressed AVI's. The best quality to work with is uncompressed, but that takes up a TON of space. The standard for quality compressed video is currently H.264 .mov files. They have good quality and smaller files sizes than most .avi codecs. A 2000kbps H.264 can easily rival a 3000kbps XviD. Plus it's an ISO standard format, so it should work on any PCs and Macs running decent video software.

Or you could export to always export to DV, which is much faster to encode than H264, and also very high quality, but also very large.

[fccabs]

Thanks for the advice. I've exported it as a .DV file and hopefully this will work.

[TD912]

If the quality of the DV file doesn't look great when using manual settings, the "Full Quality" preset in iMovie should export a higher quality DV file.