Handbrake?

Q

QTI

Member
As many helpful users have suggested, I am looking at solutions like Cineform Neoscene to solve my problem of not being able to import 720 50p video into iMovie. From reading on this website it seems at least for now Neoscene for Mac is not perfect (as against the PC version although I guess will be sufficient for my non-pro purposes) and a fix may be coming out soon.

Has anyone used Handbrake? It is free and is capable of transcoding the MTS to m4v which is ok with iMovie. Any downside that I should be aware of?

Many thanks!

QTI
 
So no one has really tried Handbrake? Its available for free at http://handbrake.fr

Sorry if this is a really dumb question, but I have converted some 720 50p clips using both the demo version of Neoscene and Handbrake (with quality set to 100%), and I can't really tell any difference in quality. Am I missing something?
 
Well, according to their own spec side Handbrake only outputs to MPEG-4, H.264, or Theora which are all long GOP codecs with smaller colour space than Cineform which will give you less range when colour correcting and may give playback problems when editing. The major problem with Cineform was handling proper 24p pulldown from 1080/60i files which is fixed but since you have the PAL version it shouldn't have affected you anyway.
 
Sorry if this is a really dumb question, but I have converted some 720 50p clips using both the demo version of Neoscene and Handbrake (with quality set to 100%), and I can't really tell any difference in quality. Am I missing something?
Click to expand...

What codec or file type did you convert to? I've used it in the past for h.264 encoding, which as Martti says is it's strong point and it does a good job. I think it could be useful for some people who simply want to put clips straight from the camera onto AppleTV/online etc.
 
I also just converted into h.264, which iMovie would accept but its very sluggish in editing (whereas clips converted by NeoScene are very smooth) - may be its the compression?
 
Yup, h.264 is sluggish also in Final Cut Pro even on a big MacPro beast. Just hitting play works but as soon as one starts to step back and forward to find edit points it gets annoyingly slow and stuttery. h.264 was intended as a final codec for distribution, not for working with in editing and colour correction.

Using Handbrake for quick web things or emailing sound like a good idea Adrian.
 
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