After much experimentation, here is what I came up with:
Equipment:
- MacBook with approximately 20 Gb of free space
- External USB drive with approximately 20 Gb of free space
- Borrowed Sony 8mm Handycam
- My current Sony digital MiniDV Handy cam with a analog to digital pass-through circuit
- iMovie version 6
- QuickTime Pro version 7.2
I connected the audio (mono) and video outputs from the analog camcorder to the analog inputs of my digital camcorder. The digital camcorder was connected to my MacBook via Firewire. With both camcorders powered up and in "VCR" mode, I manually played the footage I wanted on the analog camcorder and clicked "Import" in iMovie. By manually selecting only the footage I wanted (plus a little extra for cleaner editing) I was able to save some drive space. I did some quick editing in iMovie to remove any extra footage, add transitions, etc... I used fade-out/fade-in between scene changes so I could cut the clip later if need be. I also worked on one subject at a time (for example, Splash Mountain at Disney World) rather than all of the imported footage. Once done with the editing, I exported the movie at full resolution (uncompressed DV) to my external drive. Once I verified that the exported movie was in fact what I wanted, I deleted the clips and transitions in iMovie, emptied the trash can, and started over with the next set of clips. I did this as many times as I had room on my external drive.
Step 2 - Compress digital movie
For step 2, I moved to QuickTime Pro. There are a ton of things to consider when compressing video, such as what the purpose is (i.e. smalled size, or best quality, etc...), what device will it be played on (iPod, AppleTV, standard DVD player), etc... I defined my goal as the best quality possible since these were going to be digital archives.
There are some tricks to help the MPEG encoder get the best quality. One is to mask the video so that the rough edges of the analog tape footage are removed. The MPEG encoder works better if the edges are well defined (I will have to dig up some sources on this). Normally these fall outside the "safe area" and are never seen when played on a VCR. However these areas are captured in the digital footage. They aren't needed. As a bonus, Quicktime can use a mask and remove the footage that is outside of the mask thus reducing the file size.
To create the mask, I opened up the DV movie in QuickTime and found a frame that exhibited the most noticeable crap around the edges. I copied that frame (Command-C or Ctrl-C) and then pasted it into a new PNG image file in Fireworks (this would work in Photoshop as well, but I don't own a copy). I set the canvas color to white, and added a layer for the mask. In the mask layer, I drew a black rectangle that covers the part of the video you want to KEEP. Make this as large as possible but still show all of the "crap" around the edges.
Trick: You need to keep the aspect ratio of the mask the same as the original video (640 x 480) else Quicktime will screw up the aspect of your final movie. To do this, manually set the dimensions of the mask to the same as the video. With the rectangle selected, choose "Modify -> Transform -> Scale". Hold down the shift key and drag a corner of the rectangle to make it just small enough to expose the edges you are trying to mask. You may need to center the rectangle in the picture.
Next, hide the "video" layer. You should now see a white border around a black box that is slightly smaller than your original video. Quicktime will ignore the white part. Export this to a GIF file. To apply the mask, view the properties page (Command+J or Ctlr+J) and select "Video Track" and then the "Visual Settings" tab. On the left you will see a "Mask" section. Select "Choose" and then browse to your mask.gif file you previously exported from Fireworks. Also check "Best Quality" and "DeInterlace" (not sure if this has an effect on exporting, so I click them just in case - the preview looks better anyway).
Next, export the movie. File->Export and select "Movie to QuickTime Movie", then click "Options". On the next window, click "Settings" and select compression type "MPEG=4 Video", Frame Rate = current (or 29.97), Key Frames = Automatic, Data Rate = Automatic, slide the Compressor Quality slider all the way right to "Best" and click "Ok" Next, click "Filter" and select "Adjustments->Brightness and Contrast". Slide the Brightness slider to the left until you get a value of -8. This compensates for the washed out effect that can happen when going from an analog to digital source. Depending on your source, you may want to experiment with this. Then, click "Size" and select "640 x 480 VGA" under "Dimensions". This is the native size of analog video footage from a camcorder. Check "Preserve aspect ratio using" and select "Letterbox". Click "Deinterlace Source Video" (IMPORTANT!!!). In the sound section, click "Settings" and select Best Quality, and "Mono" under channels (if your analog source was mono).
Using the current settings, export the video. You will end up with a file that has a ".mov" extension, and is slightly smaller than the original uncompressed DV file. Next, open up the new Quicktime movie you just created export it using the AppleTV preset. It may take a while to encode, but the result will be a file that is about 10% of the original size, with no discernible quality loss (as compared to the original analog source).
Even though this is a three step process, the result is a video clip that looks a little better than the original, takes up as little drive space as possible, can be easily viewed in iTunes as-is, and looks really good when making a DVD.
