I am not able to share footage from miniDV tapes into a video with resolution of 720x540.
My system is:
Mac Mini Mid 2011
Mavericks
Final Cut Pro 10.1
Do I need Compressor for exporting footage to 720x540?
Thanks in advance.
Mac mini (Mid 2011), OS X Mavericks (10.9.1)
NTSC or PAL mini DV?
There's no such thing as a DV resolution of 720x540. It's either 720X480 for NTSC or 720x576 for PAL. To export specific non-standard formats you can either create a non-standard project or use another application that allow image resizing and cropping like Compressor or MPEG Streamclip.
I believe it's NTSC since I'm in US.
I have about 50 miniDV tapes I've accumlated over 10 years. I've digitized all of them using iMovie 9.0.4 and about half were exported to videos with resolution of 720x480. Resolution of 720x480 was a resolution option specifically offered by iMovie 9.0.4. Now I had stayed with 9.0.4 because of incorredt data/time bug in iMovie introduced after 9.0.4.
Recently I got more familiar with Final Cut Pro X (which is now at v10.1) and decided to use FCP v10.1 for exporting videos from the 2nd half of the digitized footage (by iMovie 9.0.4). And here's where I run into the problem of not being able to export videos with resolution of 720x480 from FCP v10.1.
So Compressor/MPEG Streamclip is the only option?
If you export a DV project it exports as 720x480. You can export to DV standard media in the settings.
Thanks Tom for response so far.
I goofed in the post dated Jan 9, 2014 1:32 PM. Please disregard that post due to wrong resolutions I mentioned in the post.
Here's the summary:
iMovie 9.0.4
I meant to say when using iMovie 9.0.4, I was able to export one hour long miniDV footage to video with resolution of 720x540. And the resulting file was about 1.4GB in size.
Final Cup Pro X 10.1
In Final Cup Pro X 10.1, I don't have the option of 720x540 when sharing.
Only option I have is 640x480.
That's correct. Those are standard DV sizes. 720x480 is the rectnagular pixel size, and 640x480 is the square pixel equivalent. If you need square pixel such as for the web I would 640x480. It's a standard size. The iMovie 720x540 blowing up pixels is not good. If your really 720x540 then you should use one of the apoplications I mentioned. Streamclip is excellent if a litle more complex, but it's free.
Share miniDV as 720x540
