Editing for HDTV Redux
 

As noted previously, I am using a dual core Intel Mac Mini with a 60" Sony HDTV as the monitor. The Mini with 512 MB of Ram worked perfectly well, but I decided to upgrade to the 2GB model, which works even better.

Uploading to the computer works quickly. Importing into iMovie takes a little while because it converts everything to Quicktime HD, but nothing is lost because the final rendering to Quicktime HD is very fast. The results look terrific, indistinguishable from the original MP4.

The only issue has been file size. The original 58 minutes from a 4GB card end up at around 16 GB. I have successfully converted the Quicktime Intermediate HDV to MP4 H.264 in the Quicktime Pro Player, and the result looks very good at less than 25% of the HDV file size, but the process takes somewhere between 15 and 20 times the running time of the video. Does anyone know of a faster way to convert? I am using a setting of 1280 x 720P, with a transfer rate of 9MB .

The conversion of a 53 minute Quicktime HD video to MP4 H.264 took 14.5 hours on a dual core Mac Mini with 2GB of RAM. It looks very good, though about 1/3 f stop darker than the original -- no idea why (actually an improvement in this case). The MP4 is 3.6 GB (about the same as what I shot on the HD1), whereas the Quicktime HD was 15GB.