Warning: this post is nerdy and technical. If you are interested in how I learned to upgrade the quality of the videos on the site read on, if not feel free to come back in a couple of days for another, more traditional post.
How do you know that you are on the verge of becoming obsessed trying to solve a technical issue? One clue is when you find yourself on Skype at 10pm with an Apple tech in the States discussing export setting for iMovie. While it is great that Apple has this level of support for free, I was really frustrated as our regional summary videos were playing with low and grainy resolution. There is nothing more frustrating than going to the effort of lugging around a big SLR camera, two lenses, a laptop and external hardrive so we can capture high resolution pictures to then have them show up in your slideshows as grainy and out of focus. Not good enough for me!
At first I did not know where the problem was. I initially suspected that YouTube was lowering the quality after uploading, so I tried Vimeo; no improvement. Then I tried playing the exported files from my hard drive; they were also grainy with jerky movement. Next I experimented with the export settings in iMovie. It did not seem to matter what settings I used when exporting using “export using Quicktime;” they all seemed to result in mp4 movies of low quality despite being relativity large files with export times of over 8 hours.
The most exasperating part was that when I exported and played the movies in iTunes they looked wonderful, clear, sharp and maybe not quite as good as the still images but pretty close. That is when I finally realized that those iTunes shared files were “.m4v” files. And despite being about the same size as the “.mp4” movies, they looked much better when played in iTunes. I finally tried uploading one of these .m4v files using Vimeo’s handy flash-based uploader and what do you know they uploaded just fine and looked great.
So while I recommend using iMovie to create slideshows of your travel pictures and video clips due to the much better selection of map animations, transitions, titles and audio setting options than iPhoto, be sure that you are exporting in the largest size available. I have detailed this process below with screen shots. I hope that this helps others with similar problems. After Googling this problem I was only able to find others complaining about it, never any solutions.
Details:
After the slideshow is complete go to Share -> Export Movie
Next be sure to select the largest size iMovie will allow, point it to where you want the file saved and a couple of minutes later you will have a high res .m4v file ready to upload to Vimeo or YouTube.
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