Great idea!

any chance this can be done on older versions of iMovie?? i have a LOT of DV… but only and old PPC

I have some truly gargantuan projects made with iMovie HD 6.0.3 and was wondering if this could work on them. Does the old iMovie allow H.264 files instead of DV files for its media?

Hmmm, I guess I could always just try it out myself.

Reid

I’m afraid this doesn’t work with iMovie ‘06. ‘06 is only able to work with DV or HDV formatted video. If you import any other format (H.264 or otherwise), it will convert that video to DV. I suppose you could back up your raw clips in H.264 format, but the conversion into DV takes an extremely long time, so it probably isn’t worth it.

Hi, I’ve been searching for ‘good’ H264 settings to archive my DV movies in a format that takes a little bit less space, so I’m interested in what these settings of you represent. What are the video bitrates for Best, Better and Normal for instance?

The settings are documented in the read-me file. I have no idea what bitrate I’m using, but I’m pretty much just moving the “quality” slider and changing the audio compression. I’m a fan of the “Better” setting which is “High” quality compression and PCM audio at the original quality/bitrate. It looks and sounds nearly indistinguishable from the original once you compress for DVD, and is about 70% smaller than DV video.

Hey, stupid question, but what kind of Developer Tools does one need? Could you link directly to the specific package or name it exactly?

Thanks a lot!

I already have most my videos compressed, as I had imported them from my digital still camera manually and compressed to h.264. but its the imovie thumbnails folder that’s taking up more room than my original movies. does this script work on the imovie thumbnails?

Tools: You’ll want “XCode”. The basic dev tools for OS X. I’d link to it directly, but it changes URL rather frequently.

Thumbnails: Yeah, they can get pretty big, especially if you have lots of clips. As far as I can tell, the thumbnails are fairly high quality h.264-compressed movies, so they’re probably close to the size of the originals (and possibly larger if there’s less compression on them!).

Compared to a DV movie, they’re pretty tiny, but once you compress to H.264, a regular-definition video can be roughly the same size as the thumbnail.

I haven’t tried messing with them or compressing them further. You could always try that manually and see how it goes.

I’ve created a project that pulls video from multiple events. If I run this and it compresses the .dv clips, will it mess up the existing events that contain the clips? Will I be able to work with a project that I’ve already made using the .dv clips? I’d like to shrink my iMovie library, but I don’t want to break what I’ve already got. Thanks.

As is stated in the read-me:

Any projects/movies that reference DV-formatted clips in your iMovie events library will lose their link to the clips. These projects will need to be re-created pretty much from scratch. I recommend exporting those projects before compressing your library.

RTFM, my friend, RTFM…

I don’t have iMovie ‘08 to test this with, but I suggest trying this with MJPEG instead of h.264. Or perhaps just setting the h.264 options to use keyframes (I-frames) only. The point of using I-frames only is to maintain the smoothness of shuttling through footage in both directions, and the point of MJPEG is that it encodes very quickly. On a G5 or Intel it should be much faster than realtime.

I have experience doing something similar with iMovie 06 by transcoding the .dv clips inside the iMovie project file (“Show Package Contents”, etc.) and then renaming the resulting movies to .dv. iMovie is fooled, mostly—It basically breaks everything except splitting and reordering clips (no transitions, effects, etc.), but for my purposes of making a rough cut while away from the original DV footage, it was fine. When I got back to my desktop, I just swapped back in the original DV clips and all was well—I had all of my edits, but with the original footage.

It’s a hack way of mimicking Final Cut Pro’s dreamy “OfflineRT” feature, which basically just automates the same process.

Thanks for this handy script.

My events happen to be on an external FW drive, so I enhanced it a bit. Here is the new getEvents handler:

[Code Deleted — These changes are now in the script plus other enhancements.]

It gets the list of disks available in Finder and presents it to the user. Also the last if-then-else makes eliminates the problem when the iMovie Events folder contains only one subfolder. The script can be further enhanced by skipping the zero-sized dv files from processing (sometimes iMovie finds something on the tape and interprets it as a zero-sized clip), to prevent an error message from the setCreationDate handler.

Cheers, Mariusz

Yes, I had the problem that Mariusz addresses of one folder in the iMovie Events folder. I found that when I copied his code from my browser and pasted it into the original script, all the &’s turned into “&”. This took a while to figure out. Also, after I saved the new script with a new name, the Export Settings folder inside of the script’s Contents had vanished, so I had to copy that from the old script.

As an aside, I tried to see if simply changing all “.dv” to “.mov” in the plist of my project would work, but iMovie just crashed. Oh, well.

Perhaps Mariusz’s improvements could be included into the next release.

Hi again. Thanks for the clarification for the XCode. Could you perhaps even precise which of the many tools within XCode one really need to install? With almost 3 GB it looks pretty heavy to me, especially because I have only some 10 GB left on my (laptop) harddrive. So, if I could install just the parts which are really needed, that would be great!

Thanks!

@ Nik

I asked my question about existing projects because your introduction at the top of this page says nothing about it. I’m not about to download and read the documentation to answer a fundamental question like this. If this is how you treat potential users then you can count me out.

By the way without the capability to preserve links to existing projects, your software does nothing more than I can already do with VisualHub.

Thanks for the heads-up on the bug and the need to support external libraries. The new script (v1.1, if you’re keeping track) now lets you specify your iMovie Events folder (but defaults to the standard one). Even if you incorporated the suggested changes (above), I recommend that you download the latest version, as I’ve built in this external drive/folder support throughout the script so that archiving also takes place on your external drive, etc. Files under 100 bytes are also skipped, which should avoid those rogue clips.

I hope you find it helpful.

I’m sorry I offended you, Jay. I’ve take your advice and updated the description to make this a bit clearer. I hope this helps others out.

I do urge anyone interested in this script to download it and check out the detailed documentation. It breaks down the compression settings, how to best use this file, and various gotchas. It’s a quick download, as the package is only 50k.

In any case, I’m glad you like VisualHub. It surely does the same tricks this script does, although I’d like to think that this little package makes it a bit easier, what with the archiving and whatnot. Use whichever tool works best for you — it’s not like I’m profiting from this in any way whatsoever.

All you need is the SetFile command-line tool which is installed at /Developer/Tools/ . You could probably use TomeViewer to extract it (or install the whole kit and just remove the rest).

Thanks Nik for all that. Unfortunately, your app just tells me that the compression succeeded - but nothing happened. Took a second to go from the “Select Quality” to the “Compression completed” dialogs. Do you have any idea what this could be?

Not sure what to tell you. I assume there are, in fact, DV files in the selected iMovie Events folder? Are they named something.dv?

Did you select the appropriate iMovie Events folder, or did you perhaps select a sub-folder (i.e. an actual event)? If the latter, it won’t do anything.

Hmmm…. it seems that when I import an 06 iMovie Project into 08, that it then does nothing. But if I create within 08 a project from scratch, then it’ll work…

Sorry, again me….. :-))

It seems that your script is not considering the correct ratio. At least, in iMovie it shows me correctly the clips in 16:9; but when running your script, it compressses them in the (standard?) 4:3 - which evidently distorts the content.

Can you give me a hint how to solve that problem?

Stef, check your iMovie Events folder and check what the file names are for the movies you want to compress. The script looks specifically for .dv files, so if the imported movies from iMovie ‘06 are either not in your events folder or aren’t suffixed with a .dv, they won’t compress. You can always compress them manually using QuickTime of course.

The aspect ratio is embedded in the Quicktime export options files. Since I built this program for plain-old DV, I assumed a 4:3 aspect ratio. (Which I’m pretty sure is standard, but I’m sure there are exceptions. My camera claims to do a 16:9 image, but it just crops the full frame to achieve it, so I’ve never shot video in that mode — I can always crop it in iMovie, after all.)

In any case, you can create a custom Quicktime Export Settings file by using the included Applescript. Just export a single movie with your preferred settings and then run the script before you export the movie. When you convert your movies, you can just point to that external file when you’re prompted to choose your settings. Alternately, you can embed that settings file in the applet by opening the package contents and moving it to …/Contents/Resources/Export Settings/. Then it’ll just show up in the menu of available settings.

Thanks for the info.

The imported iMovie06 films are indeed in .dv format, same as the newly imported from the camera. Don’t see a difference there.

No idea about the 16:9 vs. 4:3 aspect ratio. However, I would like to keep your settings (Best & Better); no fiddeling around with the parameters. Is there any way to include the 16:9 into the setting files of yours directly?

Thanks a lot for your work and your prompt reply. Great, really great!

I’m not an active iMovie user, but my mom has quite lot of MJPEG-encoded movies from her digital photo camera in her iPhoto library. I have always thought that it would be nice to compress those with a more efficient codec. Could your program be easily adapted to also support movies in iPhoto libraries?

Some clarification on the aspect ratio issue. Most MiniDV cameras shoot in 4:3 by default, and 16:9 as an option. In these cameras the sensor that is capturing the video is a 4:3 proportioned sensor. For these models, it makes little sense to capture in 16:9, because as Nik said, you’re really just chopping the top and bottom off of your video. BUT! Some recent Non-HD MiniDV cameras do have 16:9 sensors, so they do capture true widescreen video (720x480, I think). But the point is that a sensor is either 4:3, or 16:9, but not both. The best way to tell which you have is to look at the LCD viewfinder. It’s ratio is almost certainly the “native” ratio of your camera’s sensor.

The thumbnails are photo jpeg files. imovie uses those to display thumbnails in the filmstrip view of library and your storyboard/timeline. If you compress it into a movie file, when you next open imovie, it will tell you that it needs to create thumbnails of the files in its library. So I guess you’re stuck with a huge thumbnails folder.

Just grab your Mac OSX install DVD, scroll down to the bottom and install Xcode Tools. You only need the very top checkbox (Developer Tools I think it is), you can untick all the rest, and you’ll have the SetFile application. I think it’s about 300MB instead of 3GB, which is nice, since the whole point of using this utility is to save space.

@Nic: Awesome little script, thanks mate!

Hey Nic,

Just found a problem with your script. If I import an iMovie06 project into iMovie08, the files are called Clip 01.dv, Clip 02.dv, etc. Not clip-date.dv. So your script ignores them, because it’s looking for files that start with clip- and end with dv. I tried changing this, but then the script fails, because it’s trying to set the date based on the filename…is there a way you could change it to look for “clip” and grab the date from the file properties instead?

Russell

Thanks for the many comments, Russel, and the tip on the Xcode install. I have no iMovie ‘06 projects at all (I re-imported all my video off the original DV tapes), so I didn’t run into that problem, but I just built one and tried it out so I’ll have test case. Handling the dates the way you suggest seems like a pretty good idea, except that imported iMovie ‘06 dates appear to be set to the date you imported the project, not the original date of the DV file. Still, some method of handling those files is an excellent idea, and the creation date of the file is as good an option as anything. Not sure when I’ll integrate that as I’m not sure how hard it’ll be to put that into the code.

I’d also like to do something to handle the 16x9 thing in the next update. QuickTime can tell me what the original aspect ratio is, so I ought to be able to figure that out.

For those asking about the Developer Tools, you don’t have to install everything; you just need the SetFile utility. If you don’t want to use Pacifist to extract it from the Developer Tools packages, you can get it from your Mac OS X Install disc. On the Leopard disc, open Optional Installs, then open Xcode Tools, and then double-click on XcodeTools.mpkg; use the Installer’s Customize screen to choose just UNIX Development Support. On the Tiger disc, open Xcode Tools and then double-click on XcodeTools.mpkg; use the Installer’s Customize screen to choose just Developer Tools Software.

Hi!

First of all, thank you Nik! :)

I don’t have DV files, but my compact digital records 848x480px 30fpd clips, compressing them with the MJPEG codec. I usually re-encode them manually, loosing the time stamp. With the SETFILE utility your script overcomes it.

I wonder it I would be able to adapt you script to re-encode my MJPEG clips using the h.264 codec and keeping the creation dates… Could you give me some hint of how to start doing it?

Thanks,

Rui

I’m getting this message:

Access denied You are not authorized to access this page.

when clicking on the link above: iMovie 08 Library Compressor

Any idea why? (And feel free to delete this comment when the problem is fixed.)

I’ve tested the download and it’s working now. I believe the problem was related to a recent upgrade to my site. Sorry for the trouble.

MacOSXHints has a nice walk though on how to use Pacifist to install just the SetFile file.

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20080124184544791

Exellent tool indeed! I used it for my entire library (i was new to imovie 08 so i didn’t have any projects yet. I actually think my resulting compressed movies look nicer… i don’t know what QT does to it.

Now I have a new tape i want to import from my camera; how do I now process those without re-encoding the existing ones in my \movies folder?

The h.264 codecs in Quicktime add some sharpening, which could be why your videos look nicer to you.

The script will only compress new DV files. Any files that have already been processed will be skipped. (It only looks for files with a “.dv” filename extension, and process files have a “.mov” extension.)

Terrific effort. Very much needed.

I am one of those who RTFM ;-)

Questions:

1) iMovie HD (v.6) files. I read the above postings about this. The DV files are stored in a package. FootTrack and iDive both can retrieve these files and move them keeping the date and time stamp. So the DV files are there with intact stamps not altered by the Finder. There may be a simple way to access those files using the same or a very similar script. It would be worth looking into as this is a real glitch as noted on the Apple Forums.

2) In the manual it says: “You can also use your own Quicktime export settings file using the included “Create QuickTime Settings File.scpt” script. Just export a movie (any movie, it doesn’t have to be one of your DV ones) using the settings you want …”

I presume this means Menu—Share—Export using QuickTime and not Menu—Share—Export Movie. Also that the purpose of this is for your script to read the “Most Recent Settings”. Correct?

“…and then run the script before closing the original movie. Nice and easy.”

I presume you mean after exporting the QT movie, but before closing iMovie?

I need to deinterlace, and this part confused me the first 3 times, so I am just mentioning it. It was nice to create and save a default QuickTime setting that matches my specific camera. Makes buying QT Pro actually worth it!

Thanks. Very useful to have a program that preserves the date and time while allowing for compression. H.264 is surprisingly good as a codec with great contrast, brightness and sharpening controls. I’d rather work in that for my little clips than wrestle with DV overhead.

I have X11 installed.

However, when processing the files I get the script error saying it is not installed. Being the not-so-trusting type I let the whole process run on 6 DV files and then checked to see if they’d been moved to the archive and the new MOV files had been properly renamed.

They have. Hmmmm….

Glad you like the program.

1. Interesting. Someday I might look into that, but it might be easier to just open the package and move out the DV files by hand.

2. Correct. The script captures the last used settings. So export a movie with your desired settings. Then either finish the export or cancel it after it starts, and then run the script to generate your settings file.

I also found my instructions a bit vague, but it’s an absurd process. I have no clue why Apple doesn’t provide a simple “save my settings for later” option.

I have no idea what this X11 problem is. The script doesn’t require X11, just setfile. If you installed the developer tools and/or setfile in a strange location (not /Developer), there will be trouble.

1. iMovie 08 bizarrely requires an import from the tape to place the date and time stamp in the filename; it will not work on a import already on disk. Oversight? Incompetence? Who knows? Very annoying.

I tried my own script to simply transfer the embedded DV timecode and date/time stamp onto the filename, but digging into the QR DV container was beyond me.

1. Probably because batch conversions is not something anticipated. Rather it’s that way anticipating disparate exports to iPod, AppleTV, beamed into SJs cortex, etc. QT PRo is powerful but subtle. Easily Apple’s least user-friendly application. Makes my junk movies look better than they should.

2. X11. OK. Tried it again. Still the same error. The DV files are being properly archived, the new MOV files have correct (swapped) date/time, but the dialogue for “no setfile” appears after each conversion. Where should setfile be? It’s there or the script would not work. I am running a brand new Leopard 10.5.2 MacBook.

The error message makes it hard to compress more than one clip at a time. Perhaps setfile is no longer unique to the developer tools :-/

Thanks for the quick response.

SetFile should be in /Developer/Tools/

I had X11 installed. and it worked, just got the error message.

Installed the full Developer XCode 3 (and trashed the 1.4 GB of documentation) and it worked flawlessly.

Interesting that it worked with just X11 save for some dialogue.

There’s been a lot of Apple Forum talk about the lousy “mysterious internal iMovie 08 codec” (to quote the always helpful Karsten Schluter of JES Deinterlacer) degrading export from iMovie 08, event the QuickTime export settings.

It looks to me like your script conveniently bypasses that issue by using only the Finder and QTPro. Am I correct? Sorry, am not versed enough in code and scripting to read between the lines.

If so you’ve got created even more versatile “edit-in-place” tool that gets iMovie 08 conversions away from Apple’s nasty habit of trying to force all our content through the YouTube/AppleTV/iPod paradigm. That deserves more thanks.

I can’t say that I was ever aware of this export problem, but that’s probably because I mostly just export for web use — youtube or not much better.

If I’m understanding the Apple forum discussions properly, these issues arise on export, not on import. (Which only makes sense — the import gathers nothing more than the raw DV file) This program does nothing to directly affect the export, it just compresses the source files. (Although it does prove that a very high quality DV -> H.264 conversion is possible.)

If anything, I would expect that this script should degrade the export. If you perform lossy compression (h.264 is lossy), you are literally throwing out information in the video to make it smaller. When iMovie re-exports it, it is re-compressing the video, again throwing out information. (probably — whether it’s supposed to do this seems to be at the crux of some of these discussions you referenced) If you throw out information twice, you’re throwing out twice as much information. (Okay, that’s horribly over-simplified, but that’s the principle)

So, you’re making a trade off of file size for quality. I find the degredation from compressing with this script (with the better setting) and then re-compressing on export (at “DVD” quality) is perfectly acceptable. I’m no videophile, though, so what I consider all right may be execrable for someone else.

It is possible that iMovie is particularly bad at exporting DV video (or maybe just HD DV video) for some reason, but isn’t as bad at exporting h.264/avchd video. This strikes me as unlikely, but I suppose it’s possible. I can’t say I’ve tested it.

I, like iMovie, am happy to make a lot of trade offs in favor of convenience over quality. Heck, that’s why I wrote this script in the first place!

I’m really glad it’s working so well for you, though. It means a lot to me that this little utility makes life easier for a lot of folks.

What your script does is allows for a DV import via iMovie 08 to be run through an QT codec with metadata intact—specifically the Library date/time stamp necessary for any cataloguing. That’s a big reason why I am using it.

iMovie 08 imports with no codec molestation. And, unlike iPhoto where the files are stored in a package, the files are readily accessible via the Finder. Your script is making an end-run around that export codec, metadata intact.

One of the biggest complaints with iMovie 08 has been that specialised export codec. From iMovie 08 to iDVD has been OK to horrible. Everyone says go back to iMovie 6 HD. But transferring content between iMovie versions is awful. From 08 to HD runs through that codec. From HD to 08 loses the metadata (and most edits). DV files are literally chopped in half for quality in order to allow for real-time, non-destructive editing, and to fit into the AppleTV/iPod/iPhone strictures. The DV viewing is SD, simply throwing away every other field to deinterlace. Steve Mullen in this thread nails it:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=7098682#7098682

Because your script takes the original reference DV file and archives it, it is possible to run the same footage through both HD and 08 efficiently for different purposes. That’s kind of why iMovie HD is available now for free.

Let’s face it. You’re right. iMovie 08 is for web export and casual presentation. There is simply no need for DV file manipulation. H.264 non-destructive editing is very, very good. It’s fast and easy on the hardware. It handles sound better than DV editing. It has basic sharpening and colour balance that beats other codecs. Apple’s tied it in nicely with QT. Given the rise of AVCHD, this is the future (once the frame rates get up to at least 24fps; and they start making larger sensors). It’s lossy but so what? DV is compressed too. If you want DVD quality, then take the archive your script creates and use iMovie HD.

From what I can tell, export to .Mac will take the H.264 from your script as is, with only the sound being modified to a streaming bitrate. I have to test that out more, but I have not seen double export compression. I’m not sure QTPro will even do that. The key point about iMovie 08 is it’s an editing app. Edit at will and then use the Finder to access the files directly. No more evil codec! What was Apple thinking! OK. iMovie 08 is a very stable app, that I will say. They’ve done a good job on its speed and stability.

If you really want to make friends, try modifying the script to tackle AVIs in iPhoto that iMovie 08 can see in the Events Library. AVIs desperately need H.264 for sharpening and sound quality, not to mention compression. I am very close to giving you money. That would bring out the PayPal account. Thanks.

Hello, in a last ditch effort to salvage a project that I need to do for work, I am trying to transfer my project to imovie HD6 from imovie 08. I need help finding out how to do this, up til this point I have always used Final Cut Pro but am now finding myself needing to use imovie. None of the clips are on the project yet they are all still just clips but I have not been able to edit them since they do not play sound. Everything I have researched and read makes it sound like you can fix that if the problem starts AFTER you have already edited it all together, but since it is an instructional video and there are many clips with pre-schoolers I am going to need to hear the sound before hand. If anyone has any suggestions for either how to get sound on the clips or to export the clips to imovie 06 that would be greatly appreciated.

Great site.

I like your style.

I will be checking back very often.

Keep up the good work!

Don’t bother with this. This software cannot convert .dv clips to H.264 and preserve the iMovie links after you have already created a project. If it cannot do this it is worthless. Converting the .dv files to H.264 can be done in batches with loads of other software like VisualHub already.

Don’t bother with this. This software cannot convert .dv clips to H.264 and preserve the iMovie links after you have already created a project. If it cannot do this it is worthless. Converting the .dv files to H.264 can be done in batches with loads of other software like VisualHub already.

Don’t bother with this. This software cannot convert .dv clips to H.264 and preserve the iMovie links after you have already created a project. If it cannot do this it is worthless. Converting the .dv files to H.264 can be done in batches with loads of other software like VisualHub already.