Making a video on a Mac that I can show on a PC

rec.video

19 Dec 2006 4:11 PM

Tim Streater

I'm trying to make a video that will be viewable on a Mac or PC,
preferably full-screen, using a Mac.

Video is downloaded from my MVX35i to my Mac and edited using iMovie. So
far so good. However this Mac doesn't have a DVD writer, and therefore
doesn't have iDVD, so I want to export it in some format that I can view
using e.g. Quicktime Viewer on a PC.

I tried exporting from iMovie to MPEG-2 but the results were rubbish
even on the Mac (lots of artifacts, looked like video I had recorded on
my digital still camera). If I export to DV I get OK quality on the Mac
but the resulting file is very large, and won't open on a PC, even in
Quicktime Viewer, or any other viewer.

At home, for another project, I was using MPEG Streamclip which told me
I needed another Quicktime component in order to export to MPEG2. I have
now installed this at home and upgraded to QT-Pro. Here at work I've
only installed the QT component (QT-MPEG2 reader?), not QT-Pro.

Exporting my edited video to DV, and now running it through MPEG
Streamclip, it wont allow me to export to MPEG2, so I'm exporting to
MPEG4. This is taking several hours (no problem with that), but in the
meantime my questions are:

1) Do I have all the components I need to produce a video viewable on
PCs as well this Mac.

2) if not, what else should I obtain.

Thanks,

-- tim