iMovie '09 & iDVD: The Missing Manual

Saving a QuickTime Movie

All right—having read all of that theory of QuickTime and compression, you're ready to do the actual exporting.

1. Choose Share → "Export using QuickTime".

   The "Save exported file as" dialog box appears (Figure 14-3).

2. Type a name for your movie.

   Unless, of course, you want to name your movie whatever the current project is called, as iMovie suggests.

   Don't remove the letters .mov from the end of the file's name, especially if it might be played on Windows computers. That suffix is a requirement for machines that aren't savvy enough to know a movie file when they see one.

3. Navigate to the folder where you want to store the resulting QuickTime file.

   You can simply press ⌘-D if you want your QuickTime Movie saved onto the desktop, where it'll be easy to find.

4. Make sure the Export pop-up menu says "Movie to QuickTime Movie". Click Options, and then click Settings at the top of the next dialog box.

   The dialog box shown in Figure 14-5 (top) appears.

5. Choose your compression options, and then click OK.

   You return to the "Save exported file as" dialog box.

6. Click Save.

   Now the time-consuming compression process begins. Compression can take a long time to complete—from a minute or two to an hour or more, depending on the settings you selected, the length of your movie, and the speed of your Mac.

   Feel free to switch into other programs—check your email or surf the Web, for example—while iMovie crunches away in the background.

   A progress bar lets you know how much farther iMovie has to ...