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I imported all of my videos from a Sony HDR-CX550V camcorder into iMovie '11. I imported the video at the original resolution 1920x1080. I was planning on converting the video into some other codec so I can view it on both a Mac and Windows machine.

Unfortunately, I learned that this video is an ICOD (Apple Intermediate Codec) format wrapped in an MOV and I cannot use Handbrake to convert the video.

So I created a project in iMovie, added one of the videos to it, and exported it to HD 1080p...and the quality was absolutely horrible! For instance, the shadows in the converted video had a red tint! It reminded me of a .GIF animation.

Unfortunately, I no longer have the videos on the camcorder, so I'm stuck with these ICOD files...what are my options? I want to convert them into something Handbrake can handle.

Thanks!

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1 Answer 1

Reset to default
2

From iMovie, go to Share-> Export Using QuickTime. Set the Export: menu is set to Movie to MPEG-4. Click the Options... button next to that menu.

Set the File Format to MP4
Set the Video Format to H.264
Set the Data Rate to something like 2048
Set the Image Size to 1080
Click OK
Click Save

That should give you a much better-quality video.

Hope this helps!

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  • Thanks...I'll try that...is there a way to batch process events in this fashion? I don't want to have to create a new project for each one...
    – Tim Reddy
    Mar 20, 2011 at 21:38
  • @T Sorry, you can't bath with iMovie, as far as I know.
    – Nathan Greenstein
    Mar 20, 2011 at 21:42
  • well...I tried those settings and I got a really small file that looked horrible...it took my 4.75GB movie down to about 100MB...I guess iMovie isn't a good fit for what I want to do...
    – Tim Reddy
    Mar 20, 2011 at 23:08
  • @T can you post a screen cap of your settings? Something must be off.
    – Nathan Greenstein
    Mar 20, 2011 at 23:10
  • I skipped iMovie and just exported from MPEG Stremclip using the x264 codec. Apparently there's much info regarding Apple's implementation of H.264 gamma to not even consider using it...thanks anyway!
    – Tim Reddy
    Mar 23, 2011 at 2:54

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