I recently purchased iLife 08 and a JVC Everio GZ-MG155U video camera. I put up a new web site for our family, and I wanted to be able to post movies that we make on the site. iMovie is really nice and it’s easy to edit the imported video to add effects, transitions, titles, etc. It also gives you a lot of export options, and one of mine was flash video. Now, I wanted to use flash video because I installed the Flash Video Player Plugin for WordPress. The only problem is that I received an error everytime I tried to export to flash video from iMovie. After googling around, I found that most people didn’t even have that option on their iMovie sharing menu. I’m not sure what’s installed on my computer that made it show up, but I guess it doesn’t matter because it didn’t work anyway. My only other option was to look for an encoder that would convert one of the working export formats from iMovie to flash video (.flv). After more looking around I discovered ffmpegX.

This handy little utility lets you drop a source video file into the interface, choose the output format, customize all the important settings, and then encode away. I chose to export to .mov format from iMovie and then drop that into ffmpegX. The new flash video was created in seconds and with no apparent problems. I then uploaded the video to my site and configured the flash video player code to stream it. Voila!

So while I’m certainly not a video production expert yet, I can at least get my home movies up onto my site in a format that’s easy for visitors to view and nice to look at. I’m going to continue trying ffmpegX for a few more videos, but if it continues to work this well then I’ll pop for the $15 to get a license.