Pastor Tom Schoeneck is looking for additional means of income, since we are so small that we are having trouble paying his salary, and he asked me to make a video of his sermon last Sunday. The sermon topic was an “Introduction to Ecclesiastes”. The sermon was about 27 minutes long, and I recorded it with my trusty Canon DV camera. I took it home and imported it into my Mac mini using iMovie. After it imported, I watched some of it (and yes I have the lastest version of iMovie installed), and I noticed that occasionally it would drop some frames. I had imported the video to my external firewire 400GB hard drive, so it should have been fast enough. Anyway, since I have a Quicktime Pro license, I tried it again in Quicktime. Quicktime now has a video import function. Anyway it worked fine, so I changed the file extention from .MOV to .DV and moved it into the media folder inside the iMovie video project. When I started up iMovie it automatically recognized new clip and asks if you want to delete it or use it. I driopped the new clip onto my timeline. This previous part is important because it avoids the very time consuming import copy process that iMovie would have gone through if I had just imported the video normally. So now I had the 27 minute DV clip in iMovie and I split it into two parts, the introduction (about 4.5 minutes), and the main part of the sermon (22 minutes or so).
Ecclesiastes Intro Part 1
Ecclesiastes Intro Part 2
I think they look pretty good. I exported them as described below using iMovie expert setting to H264. I had tried several other encodings, but they ended up with files that were too large to be usable on the web, and while 40MB or so is very large for a web movie, it is 26.5 minutes, so I don’t feel bad.
The specs on the video are as follows (for you nerdi types);
Data Rate: about 210 kbits/sec
Video: H264, 320 x 240, Millions of colors, 15 FPS
Audio: AAC, Mono, 16kHz
Editor’s Note: The videos above have been modified by youtube.com to work with their video display software, so they may not have the same visual quality they did when I was hosting them on my own web server as Quicktime H264 files. Flash is required to play these videos.