Converting .m2v to edit in iMovie

[ilesh]

My wedding video was given to me as a DVD. There are three DVDs all up and I want to use iMovie to edit them so I can make a highlights package to fit onto one DVD to send to friends. Final Cut Pro is a bit too complex for me to use.

I have ripped the files off the DVDs using DVD Extractor and I have the .m2v files on my hard drive. I can use QT to combine the video and audio so this is not an issue.

My issue is in converting the video to a format that iMovie will read iMovie will not read mpeg-2 files. I have used QT to convert the m2v to mov using the DV PAL and Sorenson 3 converters. The results are not great. The colours seem either too bright or faded. With both these converters I selected the highest quality setting. There are quite a few other converters that QT has but I don't have the time to try converting a 4 Gig file to all these formats.

1. Anyone suggest a converter that gives results that will closely match the original .m2v file.

2. Any other way of converting the m2v file to an iMovie friendly format.

Thanking you.


Ilesh

[liam@arespress.com]

This shouldn't be a problem, I'm thinking...

iMovie before 3.0 only could import DV stream video. I am assuming that you have the component that allows M2V play on quicktime and that you have quicktime pro. From quicktime simply export and choose movie to DV stream. It sounds like you may have done that. This should not degrade the video quality because it is not compressing it (I think). From there import into iMovie. Be sure the import file has a .dv.

iMovie 3.0 can import QT movies with some size constrictions - maybe around 2 GB???. From QT open your M2V movie and Save as. Choose "self-contained movie" option and this will save your M2V as a QT .mov. This will maintain the video quality of your M2V. Import it into iMovie form there.

There should be no reason to compress, recompress anything. Let me know if that doesn't help.