MP4 Movies get much bigger after import

[reza666]

Hi, I have around 334 small movie clips that i have take with my mobile or canon camera. I used Handbrake to convert them from avi (mostly) to MP4 format in order to be able to import them to iMove. all and all they ended up being around 10Gig altogether. Now when i import them to iMovie it ends up being arond 43Gig. This is a huge increase . Now i'm talking mostly about movies that are low quality like 640x480 here and not HD movies. Why does iMovie make the movies this much bigger? Is there a way to go around this and import them in their original size/ratio? Thanks for tips and comments.

[rumplestiltskin]

Older versions of iMovie convert everything to DV-Stream which, as you've noticed, is huge. iMovie (and most other NLEs) find it difficult or impossible to work with highly compressed video (which, after all, is a delivery format not intended for editing). You might try MediaEdit from Mien Software: http://www.miensoftware.com/mediaedit.html.

[reza666]

Hi, not sure what you mean by older iMovie 11 version? i use the latest version iMovie 11 (v9.0.7) so do you mean all version or?
What i dont understand is that i import the files iMovie already supports so i just dont understand why they get bigger? Or do you mean my mp4 files are compressed and iMovie "uncompress" them in the same mp4 format?

[rumplestiltskin]

You'll have to ask others about iMovie 11 as I don't use it (having found it less than useful for my needs). I just tried using MediaEdit and it directly ingested two AVI files that were a total of 56MB without any conversion. Then I exported as H264 in an MP4 container with 128k audio. The AVIs were 640x480 as was the exported file. The export file is under 5MB and, to my eyes, has the same quality as the original AVIs.

[reza666]

That is also what i made, my avi files were shrunken quite allot when i used Handbrake to convert the avi file to MP4 but then iMovie somehow makes them bigger.
Thanks for your tips i will have MediaEdit for backup plan but i really like iMovie since it works well with my "real" video camera which records AVHCD (or what they are called). These smaller movies are from old times so i thought it would be nice to have them in my library but if they get this big i just save them in in MP4 (around 10gig) and use them when i need to