.m4V And/or .dv

[adamz]

Does anyone have any strong views on whether to use .M4V or .DV when making films.

 

I've used iMovie for about seven years now and have always used .DV when making a final film, as opposed to .mov for the much better quality it gave.

 

However with the latest version of iMovie you appear to have a new option, .M4V.

 

When I create a final film, with the two options, the .M4V file is about 1/8 of the size of the .DV file so I, not unreasonably, assumed the quality of the .DV film would be better.

 

However, upon examination, the film made with thee .M4V file appears to be smoother?

 

Does this make sense to anyone and if so, would it be possible to explain why the .DV file is so much bigger if it is not as good?

 

The only advantage I can see of .DV is that the format is interchangeable with other applications. One of the biggest issues I had from moving from my old iMovie 4 to the current version is that while my .DV files could be transferred across, all my old project files could not.

 

Thanks!

[tsantee]

DV once was king when you wanted quality and editing capability. Today there is no advantage of DV over a h.264 MPEG 4 video (which is what the .m4v is from iMovie), while the h.264 has advantages of much smaller file sizes, progressive scan and support for HD video. The only reasons to use DV is if that is the source video and you wan't to avoid and encoding of your master, or you have an older external video player that can't play an h.264 video.

[adamz]

DV once was king when you wanted quality and editing capability. Today there is no advantage of DV over a h.264 MPEG 4 video (which is what the .m4v is from iMovie), while the h.264 has advantages of much smaller file sizes, progressive scan and support for HD video. The only reasons to use DV is if that is the source video and you wan't to avoid and encoding of your master, or you have an older external video player that can't play an h.264 video.

 

That's great, I appreciate the confirmation.