iMovie 6 & iDVD: The Missing Manual

The Expert Settings

The canned presets aren’t the only ways you can turn your iMovie project into a QuickTime movie. By choosing Expert Settings from the pop-up menu shown in Figure 12-1, and then clicking the Share button, you embark on a tour of crazy nested dialog boxes. Along the way, you’ll be offered control of every aspect of the compression process, including which codec it uses, the degree of sound compression, how many frames per second you want, and so on.

The first dialog box to appear is the “Save exported file as” box, where you can type a name and choose a folder location for the file you’re about to save (Figure 12-5, top). Resist the temptation, for now.

The real power lies in the buttons and pop-up menus elsewhere in this little box. For starters, the Export pop-up menu (shown at top in Figure 12-5) offers a wealth of conversion options. This is your opportunity to save your film as:

• An AVI file to give to your Windows PC-using friends. (Choose Movie to AVI.)

• A huge folder full of still images, one per frame of your movie. (Choose Movie to Image Sequence. Click Options to specify the file format—like JPEG or Photoshop—and how many stills per second you want.)

• A soundtrack. Here’s a great opportunity to convert the audio tracks of your movie into standalone sound files. (Choose Sound to AIFF, Sound to Wave, or whatever format you want.)

  You’ll find this feature very handy every now and then. For example, certain troubleshooting situations, described in Chapter ...