Making a good compressed movies starts by capturing and editing your source material at the highest quality possible. FreeDV is an ideal environment for editing web movies because it preserves full frame-rate and full resolution DV files (720x480 for NTSC; 768 x 576 for PAL). While FreeDV maintains the quality of your original footage, the movie files it creates are very large. Therefore, it is important that, once you have completed editing your Story, you reduce its size by exporting it to a compressed format. This section describes the main steps required to save a completed Story to a format appropriate for low bandwidth delivery.
Creating a compressed movie with FreeDV is performed once your Story is complete. It is highly recommended that you begin by experimenting with a short 5-10 second test clip from your Story. Using a short test movie allows you to quickly compress and compare results using different settings. (When you upgrade to the complete version of IntroDV, you gain access to a much wider variety of compression settings, and you can customize your movies for optimum playback performance on the web or CD-ROM.)
- With your completed project open, select the Export button or go to File-> Export.
- Choose a destination for your exported movie. Your Story title and directory is the default name and destination for the exported file. The default format is "Movie to QuickTime Movie".
- Select one of the pre-set formats from the Use pop-up menu, and click Save.
Experimentation is the key to finding the right balance between playback quality and file size.
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