Move a quicktime movie to apple tv

Question

I recently made a movie in iMovie, I accidently deleted the original imovie file, but I have both a DVD copy of the original and Quicktime file of the movie. For the life of me I cant figure out how to either save the DVD copy as a new file in imovie or take the quicktime file and move it to movies on my appletv. When I drag and drop the quicktime file on to itunes movie it doesnt appear. Any help....thx dave

Answer 1

I'm guessin the quicktime movie is DV as suggested and that it won't drop into itunes because of it's size.
If you haven't bought Quicktime pro you won't have it, it's not free and will cost you $ 30 (I think).
If you don't want to do that you have a few options but the two that have been discussed here are handbrake and mpegstreamclip. Both are free and good quality products but you might want to consider which route you want to go down.
Handbrake is easier to use than mpegstreamclip but there's a bit more to it than that. You might want to try to understand the type of compression used in each option.
DV, this is likely the compression type used by your camera, imovie and I'm guessin the compression type your quicktime movie is in. DV is basically the best standard definition compression at consumer level. It involves very large file sizes and let's say a quality of 100%.
Mpeg4/10 (AVC), This is the compression type you will use to make your movie compatible with tv. It will reduce the size of your DV file to less than 10% of it's original size for a small loss in quality of lets say 20 %.
Mpeg2, This is the compression used when you made your DVD, it reduces DV sizes down to about 25 % of there original size for a let's say 20 % reduction in quality.
The actual reduction in quality here is my guess work but you get the idea.
The other things you need to remember are that you can never regain quality you have lost and every time you convert you will lose quality.
So we already have the mpegstreamclip scenario, you'd be going from DV to AVC and losing about 20 % quality.
If you use handbrake, you've already lost 20% of your quality because you are starting off with mpeg2 which has been converted from your original DV. However even though AVC is the same quality at a smaller size you will still lose some quality because of the conversion process. So your end result may be a 30% loss in quality compared to a 20% loss by using handbrake.
The first thing to do is to make sure you do have DV in your quicktime file. Open it in Quicktime and from the windows menu select the movie inspector and fom the window that appears take note of the format.
Having done that decide which route you want to go down, do a search for the appropriate software and download it. Handbrake will convert your DVD, mpegstreamclip your QT file. If you want any help with setting just post back.