iMovie and Vimeo

Here we will go over the best settings for saving a movie to vimeo using iMovie. Note these steps were done with iMovie HD. They may be slightly differernt depending on the version you use.

A very good tutorial which shows the entire process on importing, editing and saving for vimeo can be found at http://vimeo.com/130622

If you have been working on your project using iMovie and saving regularly (always remember to do that!), what you have is a file that can only be seen using the iMovie application. In order to share it with others (and upload to vimeo), you need to save the project as a movie file. Here are the steps!

  1. From the “File” menu select “Share” (or may be called “Export”)
    imoviefileshare
  2. Select “QuickTime” from the options at the top and for “Compress movie for” ,  select “Expert Settings” from the drop down then click on “Share”
    imoviequicktimesave
  3. Type in the name of your movie and note where you are saving it so that you can locate it when uploading to vimeo. From the “Export” drop down choose “QuickTime Movie” and then click on “Options”:
    imoviefilenamesave
  4. You should now see the “Options” section:
    imovieoptionssave
  5. Click on “Settings”. This allows you to customize the video settings of your file. For “Compression Type” select H.264 from the drop down. For “Frame Rate” select “Current”. For “Key Frames” select “Every” and enter “30″ for frames. For “Data Rate” select “Restrict to” and type 1200 for the kbits/sec. Note that increasing this number will give you better quality but a larger file. You may want to experiment with this. All other settings can be left as is. The click on “OK” to return to the “Options” screen.
    imovievideosettings
  6. Click on “Size” and choose 640 x 480 and “Deinterlace Source Video” and click on “OK”
    imoviesizesettings
  7. Click on “Sound” and set “Format” to AAC, “Rate” to 44.100 and “Target Bit Rate” to 128. Then click on “OK”
    imoviesoundsettings
  8. Back at the “Options” screen again, select “Fast Start” under “Prepare for Internet Streaming” and click “OK”:
    imoviestreamingfaststart
  9. Lastly, click on “Save” and the movie will start compressing and saving. Depending on the length of the movie and the speed of your computer, this may take a while.

That’s it!