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my current workflow for home movies

  • get the file into mp4 format, either by selecting this on the camera or converting using a program such as Adobe Media Encoder
  • see how many vertical pixels your input file has, and use the corresponding Apple preset at 29.97fps:
    • if input file is 480 high, use “Apple TV, iPad, iPhone 4 and newer - 480p Widescreen 29.97, H.264”
    • if input file is 720 high, use “Apple TV, iPad, iPhone 4 and newer - 720p Widescreen 29.97, H.264”
    • if input file is 1080 high, use “Apple iPad 2, iPhone 4S - 1080p 29.97, H.264”
  • use exiftool to read date information from your files so you can set tags correctly
    • here is an example reading existing mp4 files that came from a camera directly. The last sed conversion is to make the date show with dashes so you can easily copy and paste into MetaX because the colons : it originally shows with will not work
      `which ls` -1 *.MP4|while read file;do
      echo "${file}" `exiftool -s -time:all "${file}" | grep "MediaCreateDate"`;
      done |sed 's/:/-/g'
    • see archiving avchd for another example usage; some files may use different tags for the correct creation date
  • use MetaX to set the following tags in your files:
    • FIXME
  • import the file into iTunes, and it will show a TV Show “Home Movies” on your Apple TV, with seasons, dates, and descriptions available in your living room
  • be sure to clean up the cache files after using because they take up a lot of space and it seems that Adobe doesn't do a good job at this (adjust location if not using the default)
    rm -f ~/Library/Preferences/Adobe/Common/Media\ Cache\ Files/*
  • docs/video/my_current_workflow_for_home_movies.1369679304.txt.gz
  • Last modified: 2013/05/27 12:28
  • by billh