Section 12.1. Saving a QuickTime Movie | iMovie HD & iDVD 5: The Missing Manual

12.1. Saving a QuickTime Movie

After you've finished editing your iMovie production, save it onto a DV cassette (as described in Chapter 11) as a backup, even if your primary goal in creating the movie is to save it as a QuickTime file. Relative to the time you've probably spent editing your movie, the cost of making this backup is trivial, and it gives you flexibility if someday, somehow, you want to show that same movie on a TV or re-edit it in iMovie.

Once that's done, you're ready to proceed with the QuickTime creation process:

Choose File Share.

The Share dialog box appears.
Click the QuickTime icon at the top.

Now the dialog box looks like Figure 12-1.

Using the Formats pop-up menu, choose one of the preset export formats such as Email, Web, CD-ROM, or Expert Settings.

Figure 12-1. Using the pop-up menu in this dialog box, you can indirectly specify how much compression you want applied to your movie, and what the dimensions of the finished movie frame will be. The small print below the pop-up menu warns you that many of these settings will reduce the size and quality of the finished product.

This decision dramatically affects the picture quality, motion smoothness, file size, and window size of the finished QuickTime movie.

Making a smart choice in this step requires some comprehension of the QuickTime technology itself, so although "Understanding QuickTime" in the next section is many pages long, it's well worth absorbing . It's critical to your grasp of QuickTime movies, what they are, and what they can do.

That section also describes the choices in this pop-up menu one by one.

Click Share.

Now the standard Save File dialog box appears, sprouting from the title bar of the iMovie window.
Type a name for your movie.

(Unless, of course, you really do want to call your movie "My Great Movie," as iMovie suggests.)

Don't remove the letters . mov from the end of the file's name, especially if it might be played on Windows computers. That suffix is a requirement for machines who aren't savvy enough to know a movie file when they see one.
Navigate to the folder where you'll want to store the resulting QuickTime file.

You can just press -D if you want your QuickTime Movie saved onto the desktop, where it'll be easy to find.
Click Save.

Now the time-consuming exporting and compression process begins. As you can read in the next section, compression can take a long time to completefrom a minute or two to an hour or more, depending on the settings you selected in step 3, the length of your movie, and the speed of your Mac. Feel free to switch into other programscheck your email or surf the Web, for examplewhile iMovie crunches away in the background.

A progress bar lets you know how much farther iMovie has to go.

When the exporting is complete, the progress bar disappears. Switch to the Finder, where you'll find a new QuickTime movie icon (see Figure 12-2). Double-click it to see the results.

Tip: You can click Stop anytime during the export process, but you'll wind up with no exported movie at all.

Figure 12-2. When you double-click the resulting QuickTime movie on your hard drive (left), it opens into your copy of QuickTime Player, the movie-playing application described in Chapter 14. Press the Space bar to make the movie play back (right).