Hi David,
You sure are rude.
So I was having issues with this as others seem to be and was waiting for your solution.
To surmise requires evidence however scant. Here's my evidence, Where's yours.1888 x 1062 is not 1920 x 1080. Wild guesses are what you seem to be about. In your test you did not indicate that the "Normal Size" is indeed 1920 X 1080. If you selected Full, according to Apple, you achieved full which is based on your hardware and not 1920 x 1080 as it is "Full" up too 1920 x 1080 whichever is greater (up too 1920 x1080) and can be viewed completely on your connected display. Yours is apparently 1888 x 1062 because you have preserve aspect ratio selected.
Steve did ask a good question as I have been searching the code for a software limit for a while and had not found one, his question made me take another look from a different perspective. The software and OS are capable provided the supporting hardware exists in one form or another this is commonly referred to as "minimum requirements" and they exist for hardware, OS's and apps alike. That is the sad reality of it or we'd all still be using our Apple II's to run iLife 08.
These are a few excerpts from Apple's QT documentation. Not my opinions or postulations.
Mac OS X Technology Overview and QuickTime 7 Update Guide
The Graphics and Media layer implements specialized services for playing audio and video and for rendering 2D and 3D graphics. One of the key technologies in this layer is Quartz, which provides the main rendering environment and window management support for Mac OS X applications. QuickTime is Apple’s technology for displaying video, audio, virtual reality, and other
multimedia-related information. Apple’s core technologies, including Core Image, Core Video, Core Animation, and Core Audio, provide advanced behavior for different types of media. OpenGL is an implementation of the industry-standard application programming interface (API) for rendering graphics and is used both as a standalone technology and as an underlying technology for accelerating all graphics operations. For details about the technologies in this layer, see “Graphics and Multimedia Technologies” (page 43).
The graphics and multimedia capabilities of Mac OS X set it apart from other operating systems. Mac OS X is built on a modern foundation that includes support for advanced compositing operations with support for hardware-based rendering on supported graphics hardware. On top of this core are an array of technologies that provide support for drawing 2D, 3D, and video-based content. The system also provides an advanced audio system for the generation, playback, and manipulation of multichannel audio.
QuickTime 7 introduces the visual context—an abstraction that represents a visual output destination for a movie—and the OpenGL texture context, an implementation of the visual context that renders a movie’s output as a series of OpenGL textures.
3. Set the QTVisualContext as the visual output of a movie by calling
NewMovieFromProperties (page 196) or SetMovieVisualContext. Note that SetMovieVisualContext will fail if the movie was not opened using NewMovieFromProperties. Additionally, this call may fail if the host hardware is incapable of supporting the visual context for any reason.
For example, many current graphics cards have a size limit of 2048 pixels in any dimension for OpenGL textures, so the attempt to set the visual context to OpenGL textures would fail with a larger movie. (One work-around for this problem is to resize the movie to fit within the hardware limitations given by glGetIntegerv(GLMAX_TEXTURESIZE, &maxTextureSize)).
So if anyone would like to produce an image of 1920 x 1080 there are too many variables to give a laundry list of settings that would work the same for everyone and the last sentence of the above paragraph is why it
appears that some of us cannot create a movie at these dimensions. What is happening is that anytime you select "Full -1920 x 1080 you are including the size of the host machine's connected display and it will result in a "Full" or "Normal Size" file for your hardware and not 1920 x 1080, this is the "default work-around".
So I am still wondering if this is true with the 30" set to 2056 x 1600 as iMovie's GUI is also (erroneously?) part of the equation so according to Apple's implementation and their documentation of such, your iMovie's
preview window would have to be 1920 x 1080 when you save as "Full" in order to not get that error.
On a MacBook Pro I can achieve satisfactory results with 24 fps and the target machines can play them acceptably well with these settings. I still do not know wether it rendered 1080 pixels from 540 or if the graphics card actually rendered the image pixel per pixel at actual size.
This is my resulting movie's info.
Format: AAC, Stereo (L R), 44.100 kHz avc1Decoder, 1920 x 1080, Millions
FPS: 23.98 and
Playing FPS: goes to 24 in about 5 seconds and pretty much stays there.
Data Size: 15.06 MB
Data rate 416.34 kbits/s
Current Time: 0:00:00:00.0 (Beginning) 0:00:05:04.07 (End) This is important to some of us. You will want to pay attention to these as they are often way off.
Duration: 0:00:05:04.07
Normal Size: 1920 x 1080 pixels This is the goal. This number has to be 1920 X 1080 or the title of this post is still the case.
Current Size: 1920 x 1080 pixels while viewed on the MBP the image quality is good but I am limited to the amount of viewable pixels of my display.
I achieved this result with the following settings. The project comprised of jpegs between 3 and 9 frames with kb's effects zoom 1 - 5x and standard DV content. The jpegs originated as 2576 x 1932 and DV 720 x 400. The jpegs look as good as the originals and the DV actually looks about the same.
In iMovie > Export > QuickTime > Compress movie for: Expert settings >Share > Export: Movie to MPEG-4 > Options
Video > Video Format: H.264 > Data Rate: 2048 > Optimized for: CD/DVD-ROM > Image Sze: 1920 x 1080 HD > Preserve aspect ratio: no > Frame Rate: 24 > Key frame: Every 12 > Video Options >
Restrict Profile to: Main > Encoding Mode > Best Quality >OK
Data rates are still very confusing as whenever they are less than 1500 in the initial settings for any size movie the image quality is very poor. Even when the resulting rate of the final file is considerably less my magic number has been 2048.
The export time is about real. While the progress window reported an estimated time of 38 minute it was about 18 all said and done.
Sweet Polly
