Done!

Still wasn't as easy easy as I had hoped it'd be. After I was finished fixing up the audio track back to how I had it before I did an export at fully quality.. which took about 10 minutes. It should've been around 400MB or so, but the prompt said it'd be around 120-180MB, a little fishy. Nevertheless I exported and then opened it up to check it out. QuickTime error! Cannot open. Great... Changed the export setting to DV Stream, progressive scan since the video wasn't interlaced. This took another 10 minutes. The resulting file was 1+ GB, which is probably about right for a DV encoded file.

Nice, it opened up and played. The quality suffered and it was quite noticeable that the resulting video file was now interlaced. Shouldn't be that big of a problem, since I'm going to be using it in an iDVD project sometime. To see if I can get the same quality I see in my iMovie project, I exported it again, this time using QuickTime conversion to encode it using H264, basically a high quality mpeg-4 codec like Divx or Xvid, but with higher quality and lower file size. I really like to get as high quality as possible, so I set all the settings to best as well as a multi-pass encoding. Same thing for the audio. It took.. maybe about 40 minutes to encode it, but what came out was well worth it. I got a mov file that was crisp, had my audio, had my transitions, and I was pleased. The file was 1GB though. I'm sure I can reencode it with ffmpegx to a smaller file size. I might play around with a couple encode settings on different files to see what the best would be for DVD playback and for computer playback. I'm sure I can get the final file size down to under 200MB. I'll do that tomorrow though, good night!