Sometimes much pain is involved in learning something valuable. I learned something valuable today.
After going through some amazing Blender (http://blender.org) tutorials and getting my first decent animation finally ready to use, I ran into a hitch.
I’m sure there’s an easy way to do this, but I couldn’t figure out a good way to get the animation produced by Blender into iMovie.
I’m running Blender on Ubuntu 10.04, and I need to get high-definition video onto my wife’s iMac where I can use it in iMovie. Sounds easy, right? All the hard part was learning to use Blender (thanks to some really amazing tutorials, and it is an incredibly powerful piece of software – with a bit of a learning curve.
Unfortunately Apple did not give much thought or consideration into making it easy to get various video sources into iMovie. If you connect your HD camcorder, it will read video. If you copy .mts or .m2ts files onto your iMac’s hard drive, it doesn’t know how to import them. I found a useful suggestion on how to use ffmpeg to convert the container (leaving the avchd video codec stream intact) to an mp4 that iMovie is happy to import using File -> Import movies…
Blender has an ffmpeg output option. You want to select output settings where both the vertical and horizontal are multiples of 16. Use avi file format with the mpeg4 (xvid) codec:
The parts in yellow are the important ones. I’m running Blender 2.49b. Note that in this example I’m not going all the way with HD – 1280×720 is enough for me. If you wanted to go 1920×1280 you would need to increase the bitrate from 6000 (kbps) to something like 9000.
If you had selected the h.264 preset before, you ‘ll want to delete the options that may have shown up. The menu button doesn’t work for me, it crashes Blender. Ouch!
Once you have all these settings, and perhaps specify your output directory, go ahead and render using Ctrl+F12
Preparing your output for import into iMovie is easy:
ffmpeg -i /tmp/mymovie_0000_0300.avi -b 6000k -acodec none -vcodec mpeg4 /tmp/mymovie.mp4
As mentioned above, if you used a higher bitrate for HD video in the Blender output options, you’ll want to use the same value here with -b
Once you’ve done this, you can copy the mp4 file to the imac and use File -> Import movies… from iMovie
