I appreciate your comments Eugenia. I found that setting the max bitrate at 5 or even 6mbps produced a lower quality vid in the end. All my stuff here is short, and I am no pro - so I blow through those bits with reckless abandon.

It will produce a slightly less quality, but thing is, Vimeo re-encodes at around 2mbps, which is way too low anyway. So basically, what I am saying is, that if you export at 5mbps you save uploading bandwidth, without the quality difference been visible on the final Vimeo re-encoding.

I get it.

I have compared at least six different ways of encoding HD for Vimeo. Just like vincenzof - I found that all the tweaking caused unwanted affects - in iMovie. The video looks better without the bitrate limit.

But I am sure the more advanced software you use is better suited to the proper compression ratios. In iMovie 08, these settings produce a fine looking video. That's all I am sayin'.

Cool. Glad it helped.

Thanks man... HD is big - get a big fat drive too :)

Hey Thanks David -

You're good people.

Thanks for the like and the comment.

sure thing!

It will work with DV as well for sure... new cameras are great.

Thanks, Roman. Glad you like the tutorial. I agree - iMovie is easy to use and makes creating videos less of a chore.

Only problem I'm having is the video that I manually copied over to the hard drive. iMovie won't recognize the .m2ts files. I found a post on a Mac forum that says to convert the folders into disk images, but apparently I'm not smart enough to do that...

I have no idea... I pull everything right off the camera using iMovie. Isn't there an Option-click for "convert file to dmg"? Kidding.

Thanks Jacob.

On the iMac I use "Full". If I am at my MacBook Pro, I import using the "Large" setting (960x540). My older MBP tends to choke on the full size video - plus, I am limited by hard drive space.

Jaggies are generally caused by a frame rate that doesn't "gel" with the Vimeo encoding. Selecting "Current" usually does the trick, but it may depend on the camera. Try setting it to 30 fps - that may help.

If you don't have iMovie, try iSquint.

Okay - cool, with iMovie and QT you can encode what you need. QT Pro isn't really necessary for your everyday iMovie type stuff. Good luck!

I did have to reduce the quality to "high" and fastest encoding - otherwise it was too big. I'll see how it comes out.