Cliffs of Dover Video Thread V1.0 [Closed]

[Les]

Ideally you don't want to use any kind of MPEG 4 compression (no matter how good it is) until you've edited your movie and want to export the end result in a more manageable file size. Having to convert the FRAPS files to MPEG 4's in order to get them into your editor means they'll end up getting compressed twice by the time you've exported your final movie, resulting in an extra level of image degradation. Whether that's really an issue though is up to you to decide. The end result will look worse, but it could still be acceptable under the circumstances.

Anyway. Did a quick readup on iMovie to see what file formats and codecs it's compatible with. It's designed to work with the following video formats -

DV
DV Widescreen
HDV 1080i (25 and 30 fps)
HDV 720p (25 and 30 fps)
MPEG 4 Simple Profile
iSight

I just tested Handbrake too and it will convert FRAPS AVI files to MPEG 4 files. You might have to adjust the Quality settings though to avoid having the image compressed too much. And whether the converted files would be accepted by iMovie or not I don't know, iMovie might only like a particular kind of MPEG 4 file. Handbrake uses either H.264(x264) or MPEG-4 (FFmpeg) codecs and iMovie might not like either.

There's another free video conversion tool I've used before (but not lately) called Super © that you can get here - http://www.erightsoft.com/Superdc.html (Scroll right down to the bottom of the page for the link, it's not the other video converter that's advertized elsewhere on the same page). This can convert the FRAPS AVI files to the DV files that iMovie (probably) works with, maybe without any compression and degradation of image quality at all, though resulting in larger file sizes too if it does. I don't have it installed at the moment and I can't remember what settings it has, but it gave good results from what I can remember.

Hope that helps.