iPhoto or iMovie help?

[mkaake]

Okay, this may seem silly, but I need help with the fair iApps...

I have a somewhat largish slideshow that I really want to export to movie for some friends, but I've run into a few hang-ups along the way.

Basically, the first hurdle was that right now, when you try to export a movie with an entire playlist selected, it will default back to Minuet in G... not quite where I was going with it.

Second attempt had me export the entire movie, and open it up in iMovie, and add music too it. Kind of nice, cause it let me match the music up with the slides. Very handy. Oh, and add some nice titles...
First problem was the movie from iPhoto had the possibility of being too large, so I had to do it in clips (even though it wasn't 2 gigs, it had the potential to eventually be 2 gigs at full export)
Second problem came when I tried to export - the original resulting file was 5 gigs!
Not quite the size I need to fit on a CD...
So the second go round, I tried to use the expert settings. Smaller file (but still huge). More interestingly, it somehow managed to save the file in such a manner that even though I choose 30fps, none of the transitions present in the original movies came through (as in, it went from pic to pic w/o any fading). Also not good.
So I gave it one more go. I took the music I wanted in the movie, dropped it into GarageBand (after a few tries... didnt' want to do it at first), and made one huge song (22 and a half minutes) and used that as the song I exported in iPhoto.
But, doing that gets rid of any matching up of the slides to the music, forcing me to change the timing of the music and choose a different final song so that it would fit the slides. No good.

In any event, I need some advice on how to export a movie in iMov to get the quality that I put in, w/o making the file huge. Doesn't really make sense to me... I put in 50 megs of movie, 20-30 megs of music, and it comes out at a much lower quality and at several hundred megs.

What can I do different in my iMovie export (as far as settings) to get a reasonable size file that has the same quality that I get from iPhoto (which is excellent by the way)?

*sigh*

anyhew, iPhoto 4.0.1, GB 1.0.1, iMovie 4.0.1, iTunes 4.5...

Any ideas at all?

matt

 

[varmit]

how many photos

How many photos are you putting in the slide show. I just did a set of 17 pictures, 10 second change over, and with music, it came out to be only 3.6 MB when exported as a mov with the default size from iPhoto. Same stuff though iMovie only gets 6.4MB with cd rom, but it would have been 300 at full DV quality. Are you sure you aren't do DV quality.

So first, check how many pictures you are doing, see if you can cut down or make two disks of two different things. Like split it by trips or whatever. Check the quality of the pictures before hand. Did you take high quality pictures that take up lots of room. My pictures were 100k a pic, see if all of yours are higher than that.

Other than that, I don't see how you got that much video.

 

[mkaake]

update

okay, just tried it again, goin all out. 11 gigs for the new file (compared to 252 from iPhoto) and it still gets rid of the transitions at 60 fps...

matt

 

[mkaake]

clarify

there's over 400, at full quality from a 2 megapixel. Exporting from iPhoto really isn't all that bad, at 252 (megs)... but when I try to do the same with iMovie, even if I bump up all the settings, my fading between pics is gone and it jumps WAY up in size... as I wrote just above, at 60 fps, it came to 11 gigs. When I go to export to cd rom, it pumps it out at 320x230 or some jazz like that. And I'm looking for 1024x768 (which is what iPhoto is at the 252 megs).

*sigh*

guess I'll just have to play more with garage band to get the music where it needs to be?

matt

 

[varmit]

try

Changing the song, from the aiff i believe that it exports it as from garageband and use iTunes to make it into a ACC or MP3 file. Might possibly cut down the space the music takes up.

 

[mkaake]

Changing the song, from the aiff i believe that it exports it as from garageband and use iTunes to make it into a ACC or MP3 file. Might possibly cut down the space the music takes up.

I totally agree with you. Unfortunately, the songs in iMovie are mp3's, while the final export from iPhoto was with the GarageBand export...

I'm pretty sure that I'm just gonna play around in GarageBand to get the songs worked out just right, add a few pictures with the titles i have in mind, and viola... faster easier and smaller than iMovie while having transitions between the days of the trips, with a nice fade in/fade out to match the pictures...

kind of a bummer though that I have to go through this kind of trouble to get it all to work out the way I want it too : (

ohh welllll..... this new emac has helped me already convert more people to macs than all my previous years combined, thanks in no small part to the iApps...

matt