Is there a better workflow using iMovie?
I run a small wedding videography business with my wife in Wisconsin and I'm wondering about a faster workflow for people using iMovie.
Here is our current process:
1. I shoot the weddings using 2 Panasonic HMC40's which records on Class 10 SDHC cards in 720/30p
2. The next day my wife and I work on importing the footage into imovie, which obviously using the AIC codec to transcode footage into quicktime compatible footage into imovie, we import the footage in the "Large" resolution of 960x540 not the full resolution.
3. My wife and I both edit different aspects of the wedding, she typically edits the ceremony and reception, and I will film the rehearsal / rehearsal dinner, extras, limo coverage and getting ready footage, if the couple books our higher end packages that include these times.
4. After we're done editing each section, each project ends up being a little less than 2 hours long.
5. We Export the footage into 720p HD footage
6. We then open iDVD and create a new project and burn standard def DVD's as the final product
We typically tell clients that we have the disks to them in 6-8 weeks, but in order to be more efficient I'd like to increase our turn around time. I know one of our compeditors offers "same day edit" services, creating a trailer that's 3-4 minutes long to play at the reception, and it' edited and created between the ceremony and reception, which seems incredibly fast.
I'm pretty sure that compeditor is recording to HDV tapes and is using final cut pro 7 for editing. He might also use a preset storyboard / or time card slots or whatever it's called.
Our process has footage being filmed in AVCHD 720/30p (real time), then is transcoded usin the AIC to 960x540 editable iMovie footage (2x real time on my 2.4Ghz macbook pro w/ 2GB of ram and a 250GB hard drive), then exported back out at 720 HD (2x real time), then changing forms in iDVD (approximately realy time) to finalize in standard resolution DVD output. With all the format changes that our footage is going through, I worry about the loss of quality, and about the general speed of our workflow. A typical 2 hour chunk of footage goes through about 10 hours of pure processing time from start to finish on my machine, and about 5 hours of processing on my wife's macbook pro, which is a core i5 (2 core) macbook pro with 4GB of ram and a 500GB stock hard drive.
Does anyone have suggestions to improve our workflow efficiency? New faster machines aren't really an option, nor is moving to Final Cut because money is really tight right now, but I'm open to low cost ideas to increasing the speed of anthing along the way.
Thanks in advance for your thoughts!
Chris
http://freedomvideography.com
Skip step 5. Since you're burning a standard definition DVD there's no need for any HD version.
You may want to consider shooting in standard definition, too.
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