Editing iPhone video without loss of quality
I've a stack of video clips taken from my iPhone 3GS which I want to simply stitch together and edit down a little WITHOUT loss of quality.
All I want to do is import, crop and stitch them together, thus create a single file *with no change in image quality*. (for smaller projects, I used to do this kind of thing in older versions of QuickTime Pro.)
What is the best procedure for this in iMovie 09? Indeed, can it be done?
My understanding is that ANY re-compression will result in artefacts and loss in quality.
Further info...
I've managed to import the clips ok (making sure any options to 'optimise' anything are turned off) and edit them together in iMovie. This way, the import is fast and the images seems untouched, so I assumed no conversion has been done on the video (I think I'm wrong here?)
(Setting the project aspect ratio to 4:3 was the other gotcha.)
Having sorted the above out, and done some editing, I now want to export to a single file. I understand the iPhone codec is H264. However, when I export (via quicktime) and select H264, it wants to re-compress. I worry this will loose quality.
When I export with lossless compression, of course I get a 150G file - owch. The sum total size of the originals are 2.63G
Any suggestions?
All I want to do is import, crop and stitch them together, thus create a single file *with no change in image quality*. (for smaller projects, I used to do this kind of thing in older versions of QuickTime Pro.)
What is the best procedure for this in iMovie 09? Indeed, can it be done?
My understanding is that ANY re-compression will result in artefacts and loss in quality.
Further info...
I've managed to import the clips ok (making sure any options to 'optimise' anything are turned off) and edit them together in iMovie. This way, the import is fast and the images seems untouched, so I assumed no conversion has been done on the video (I think I'm wrong here?)
(Setting the project aspect ratio to 4:3 was the other gotcha.)
Having sorted the above out, and done some editing, I now want to export to a single file. I understand the iPhone codec is H264. However, when I export (via quicktime) and select H264, it wants to re-compress. I worry this will loose quality.
When I export with lossless compression, of course I get a 150G file - owch. The sum total size of the originals are 2.63G
Any suggestions?
20" Intel iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.3), iPhone 3GS
