Question on how you'll manage photos/videos?

[kepardue]

I'm on board with getting 1tb to store my photos in the cloud. I'm quite excited about that. However, Apple seems to be making clear these last few years that iPhoto, nee Photos library, is for Photos + Videos. While iMovie is really just for the "projects."

I have a lot of home movies, both from the iPhone and from a dedicated video camera, most of them scattered clips in iMovie events named something like "New Event 7-1-12." I'm wondering if it makes sense to move all of them into the iPhoto library so they can make the transition to Photos once iOS 8/Yosemite come out? Are any of you planning on managing your libraries as such?

My only worry is that I may have to compress my movies (while retaining the originals) more. Some of these are SD videos taking up 1gb for a 5 minute video. I'm wondering if they should be converted, and what the best way to do that would be?

 

[3282868]

I have no idea what Apple has in store. Apparently iPhoto will re placed with "Photos" for OS X next year. I do not like the current setup, in which I cannot sync my events directly onto my iPhone 5s w/ iOS 8. All photo's are placed into the renamed "Camera Roll" aka "Recently Added" album, which forced me to recreate events by selecting the corresponding photo's from the "Recently Added" roll. That doesn't move the photo's, it simply "organizes" them, and you cannot delete photo's from the main folder.

It doesn't make any sense. I don't want my entire library in the cloud. If Apple was smart, they would finally separate app's in OS X based on media and use a revamped iSync as the syncing conduit. iTunes for music, iMovie for movie editing and purchasing movies/tv shows, Photo's for photography, with iCloud syncing your personal data. It's already doing this with Pages, Numbers and Keynote via iCloud sync. iTunes has become bloated and cumbersome.

 

[kepardue]

I definitely agree with you that the current implementation is cumbersome. It's a pain to have what's on my iOS device be separate from what's in iPhoto. I'm very much looking forward to having one photo library across *all* of my devices, with the added security of an offsite backup.

Like I said, my main concern was videos. DV and AIC files take up tremendous space. H.264 is about 12%-15% of the size, and when I converted some and compared them side by side, I honestly couldn't tell a difference. I've always hard enthusiasts say you never want to have your source in h.264 because it's lossy, but it seems like that's the same losing argument in favor of .tiff over .jpg for photos. Sure, .tiff is lossless quality, but given the file sizes that doesn't make a practical difference. I think I'm going to retain a backup of all of my original home movies, and convert them to h.264.

 

[baryon]

I strictly keep everything in my own folders, always, that way I'm not at the mercy of Apple's new silly implementations. For this reason I steer clear of iPhoto, Lightroom or Aperture, since they all insist on organizing your files for you, or at least they make you feel like you should do the organizing within those apps. That results in you being at the mercy of those apps. So for example, if you need to use a PC for a few weeks, you're screwed. Or if you decide to start using another application to do the organizing, you're screwed. I'd say always have everything locally organized in a strict way first, everything else should be secondary.

Also, don't compress photos or videos in order to save space. In one year you'll regret that, when storage space will cost less. I remember 10 years ago in order to save my 20 GB hard drive I deleted and converted BMPs to low quality JPEGs to save a few megabytes. I really regret that now, when that sort of space is literally free.

 

[kepardue]

I've been using iPhoto for years to organize my photos, and have no problems since I know how it structures it and how I can get my data out if I need to. I partially agree with the comment about converting the quality. My home movies are too precious to lose the originals for. So, I'll retain a copy of the originals for future conversion to h.265 or whatever comes along to supplant h.264, but still convert to h.264 now so that this fall/early next year I can get everything into iCloud Photo Library. So, I get the best of all worlds.

I'm comfortable with this because there's no noticeable difference between a DV file and an h.264 file (just as there's no noticeable difference between a TIF and a high quality JPEG). Heck, in the case of my oldest videos, Quicktime actually *converts* it to h.264 before it plays it back, anyway.

 

[3282868]

An easy way to convert any videos, use "Handbrake". After studying everything I could on codecs in order to achieve as close to lossless as possible, I spent a full year digitizing my DVD and Blu-Ray movies using my then 12-Core Mac Pro (got a new model, cut rendering times drastically). I spent weeks, maybe months, learning and experimenting with Blu-Ray rips, compared the end result with the original disc and even iTunes versions (which it killed), and finally had a 1920x1080 preset that passed through DTS (supported in Handbrake for a long while now), AC3, etc with the highest Encoding and Analysis settings as necessary, shrinking down 25-50GB mkv's to 4-12 GB files without a single noticeable difference. Course it took 8-10 hours per movie, but it's all on my servers and backed up.

If you haven't used Handbrake (I'm sure you have based on what I've read), give it a go, it's free and I'd use the nightly GUI build. Even though it's H.264, I'd be hard-pressed to see (and hear) a difference from the original source (although nothing can replace Blu-Ray quality - yet - with 54Mbps+). You could keep the originals on an external USB or Thunderbolt drive and transcoded versions on your Mac or server to be safe, however I have the sense unless they're 3D, you won't need the originals.

 

[kepardue]

An easy way to convert any videos, use "Handbrake".

I love Handbrake. I went through my entire DVD collection and used it to rip to iTunes on my Mac. To convert my home movies, however, I've just made an Automator script to convert each clip to its equivalent resolution H.264 (SD, 720p, 1080p). I should be able to just drop my converted clips into iPhoto, adjust the Date and Time for the clips, and be ready for the transition early next year when iPhoto is replaced with Photos.

And, of course, I'll keep my original clips in DV on two drives, one at home and one stored offsite.

 

[3282868]

I love Handbrake. I went through my entire DVD collection and used it to rip to iTunes on my Mac. To convert my home movies, however, I've just made an Automator script to convert each clip to its equivalent resolution H.264 (SD, 720p, 1080p). I should be able to just drop my converted clips into iPhoto, adjust the Date and Time for the clips, and be ready for the transition early next year when iPhoto is replaced with Photos.

And, of course, I'll keep my original clips in DV on two drives, one at home and one stored offsite.

Handbrake is the best, hands down . This is my x264 Advances string, it's a bit over the top, but after 6+ months of testing it out on BD rips it's the practically lossy. I played the same files against the original BD on a Pioneer 60" 1080P Elite and a Samsung 55" 3D LED LCD, I couldn't tell the difference. With DTS passthru you can't go wrong. (warning: there's no space between 50: and psy-. had to space it so it would parse it into )

b-adapt=2:rc-lookahead=50: psy-rd=1.5,0.10:bframes=8:ref=8:me=umh:subq=10:trellis=2:analyse=all:merange=32:aq-strength=1.2