What's the optimal Handbrake setting to convert AVI for editing in iMovie/Final Cut? A friend has a Canon still camera (the PowerShot G9) that has a movie mode. My research shows that the camera produces 30 fps VGA-sized AVI files (probably uncompressed). She wants to send the footage via iDisk or Dropbox to someone else to be edited (in iMovie or some flavor of Final Cut), but is being frustrated by the large AVI file sizes (more than a MB/sec). I know that she'll want to convert the raw movies in Handbrake before sending, and I've seen with my own movies that converting AVI to some version of MPEG4 can result in significant size reduction.

Two parts to this question:


What is the optimal Handbrake setting (preset preferred; this is a non-technical user) to convert AVI to an editable format?
If there is more than one editable format, which one will produce the smaller files? Since the source material is only VGA quality, I don't think that resolution will be a major issue, though of course we don't want to degrade video quality.
Don't forget the built-in Automator actions for encoding. The video plugin is very nice and has pre-sets starting with 480p (VGA size) and up.



The Encode for: Greater compatibility toggle keeps the audio and video at a lower bit rate. Depending on what your tolerance for "less degradation" is, you might experiment with Higher quality if you see too many H.264 artifacts on the default setting. It's unlikely as the encoder has a lot of room with 1.5 Mbps as the ceiling for the video data rate.

You could set up a few services to test the various settings and then make a folder action to apply your favorite encode setting to anything you drop in that folder.

Automation is fun—you might even be able to set up a folder action to do your uploading as part of this process.