Choosing the Best iMovie Export Settings

When you export from iMovie you get to choose from several quality and resolution settings. Here's how to make the right choice, a balance between quality and file size.


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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to choose Export options in iMovie on your Mac.
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So after you're done making your iMovie project you need to export it. You have a lot of options when exporting and the options will determine both the quality of the video and the file size. So here I am inside of an iMovie project. I can export by either clicking this button here and it gives me these four options or I can go to File, Share and I get the same four options there. Now Image will just export the current frame as an image. The other three options allow you to export video. Both Email and the YouTube & Facebook options give you a very limited set of settings. We take a look at Email and it's only going to allow us to choose a resolution here. We can go to a pretty small resolution. After all you probably want to have a small video if you're going to send it my email. I wouldn't try to send any video by email. Videos are just too big to send by email. Even if you can do it it's quite an assumption to think that the other person can easily receive that large file. You don't get to choose any more options but the ones here. Likewise if you choose YouTube & Facebook you also get a very restricted set of options. You can just choose the resolution just like with email. You can choose some different resolutions going all the way up to 4K if your video is 4K. But you can't choose anything else like the compression amount and this doesn't upload to YouTube or Facebook. It just creates a file and then you upload using the website itself. Previous versions of iMovie allowed you to upload directly to sites like YouTube. But it's really a good thing, in my opinion, that iMovie doesn't allow you to do that anymore. Because if you're uploading to a site you really should be using the website which gives you the full set of upload options and allows you to set all the features of that video.
Now if you want all of the export options you would simply go to File, Share and then File. This gives you the full set here. So first you have to Format. Of course if you're exporting a video you want to choose a video and audio. Not audio only. Then you get to choose the resolution. So this is the dimensions of the video in pixels. Here you could see you get four options. 1080p is the standard high definition video. It's 1920 by 1080 in size. 4K is 3840 by 2160 in size. 720 is the original high definition format. It's a much smaller 1280 by 720. Then 540 is actually pretty close to standard definition video. So a video like we might have used years ago or would be found today on DVD's which are still standard definition. Not high definition.
Now choosing one of these is going to extremely effect the size. You could see the estimated size right here. In this case here 1080 for a one minute, two second video. This is going to end up to be about 157 MB. But if I were to reduce the resolution and make this only 720p then you could see that drops considerably to 95 MB. If I go all the way down to standard definition you could see it's now 56 MB. On the other hand if I go up to 4K you could see it balloons to 390 MB. You may not see all four of these. In particular you may not see 4K. In order to have the 4K export option your video clips have to be 4K. Specifically the first clip you added to your project needs to be 4K. The only way to have a 4K iMovie project is that when you create the project the very first clip you add is 4K in size. So if you plan on making a 4K video then it's important that you first import a 4K video clip even if that's not going to be the first clip you're going to use. You could then remove it and then start adding 1080 clips or photos and at some point add the 4K clip later on. Obviously you're going to have some 4K clips in there else it doesn't really make sense to export in 4K. You'd just be upscaling lower resolution video.
So in this case here I'm using all 4K. But if I wanted to create a smaller file one thing I would consider is just simply setting it to 1080. They're not going to get the full resolution of the video but if I go to bring down the file size changing the resolution might be the first thing that I do. Next you can set Quality. You've got three settings here at the top. Low, Medium, and High. Choosing Low would create a smaller file size. But you're sacrificing quality here. So the video is not going to look as good. Medium will create a slightly larger file with slightly better quality and High will create a larger file still with even better quality. You could also choose ProRes. ProRes is going to be minimally compressed and it's going to create a huge file. Use this if you plan on exporting this from iMovie and then bringing it back into iMovie to be part of another project or perhaps bringing it into some other app to do something else with it. So in other words what you're exporting here isn't what you're going to share with other people. It's what you're going to use in further editing.
Finally, we've got Custom. Custom allows you to set the quality with the slider here. It defines the quality by megabits per second. So, here at this setting for a 157 it's 20 megabits per second. I could lower this amount to have fewer megabits per second in the file and that's going to decrease the size and also decrease the quality. So if I go all the way down here I can bring this down to 27.9 MB, a pretty small file for a one minute 1080p video. But the quality is going to suffer quite a bit. On the other hand I could bring it all the way up to something higher and have a larger file with slightly better quality than the default high. Now in addition to that you also have this compressed setting. There's only two options here. Faster and Better Quality. So you could use Faster if you're exporting to checkout your finished product and see what you've got. Using Better Quality is going to improve the quality of the final video ever so slightly. But it will take longer to produce the output. Notice the file size doesn't change because it's still going to be saving at a certain megabits per second rate. So in general I use Faster until I'm completely done with the project and I want to produce something that I'm going to upload to YouTube or send to whoever is getting the file. Then for that last export I'll switch to Better Quality and use that.
So how do you choose which one is right for you? Well, you can make some guesses based on the file size. Maybe there's a limit to what you're willing to have as far a how big the file is. But also you could just experiment. You could try exporting at Low, Medium, High, 720p, 1080 and see what the differences are for you. Maybe a lower quality is perfectly acceptable for you and for this particular project. Then maybe on another project you'll want higher quality. A lot is going to depend on actually what's in the video. For instance, if you're shooting on a tripod where the camera is perfectly still and the background isn't changing much. It's an indoor background. Then you may not need as high of megabits per second setting to get decent quality. Whereas, say, filming holding your iPhone in a moving car is going to require a lot of change on every frame and you'll probably need a higher megabits per second in order to have decent quality in that video. So export a few different ways. If your video is long consider making a second project and maybe just have one or two short clips in it. Maybe ten seconds long as your sample and try exporting that ten seconds in different quality settings. Once you find the one that works for the type of clips in your main project then use those same settings for that big project.
So I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.Related Subjects: iMovie (117 videos)
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