Comments on: Exporting video for iPhone

By: Ian H

Ian H — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 07:06:49 +0000

Thank you so much for posting these instructions! How ridiculous is it that the standard “iPhone” option in FCE does such a terrible job and pushes wide screen footage into 4:3 ratio. This has been annoying me for a while, so glad that google brought me to your site, and that you have taken the time to share this.

Ian

By: Skip Bensley

Skip Bensley — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 03:20:33 +0000

I have an edited piece with music and talking. the music plays and talking plays on itunes but not on iphone. Any ideas on that one?

By: Manuel

Manuel — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 09:48:55 +0000

Dear Greg,
unfortunately, I just found your description of converting to iPhone after I myself had the whole trouble to figure out how to export with quicktime.
Finally I managed to find out the same as you, but I’m stuck again.

What I found out is the following:
iPhone can playback even higher resolutions than 640×480, in fact it can 720×480 at 30fps and 720×576 at 25 pfs (PAL). Further, the Bitrate can be up to 3000.
Now, I had a Movie and converted it to a standard h.264 mp4 with a resol. of 500×280 (no problem) and a bitrate of 1900 ( should be no problem for iPhone). I set Profile to Baseline and selected high quality (multi pass). I encoded serveral movies just like that and it worked. Now I did it again and it says iTunes cannot sync the file since it can’t be played etc….
I was confused… I figured out how to do it and it took for hours and now the same problem, and it is quicktime I used, I thought the on-board apple app should be perfectly compatible… it’s not.
So I tried VisualHub, exactly the same settings, and it worked. I also tried to export a small part of the movie in quicktime to check if I unintentionally did some wrong settings, but no, it was the same movie, same resol. same bitrate, just a smaller file because it was just 1 min out of the movie and this time it synced… I thought maybe there is a limit of 2GB since the whole movie was 2.18GB but the same movie converted with VisualHub worked fine.
As you sayd, iTunes convertion sucks cause you cannot set a specific resolution etc. maybe you know more than me and can help me…? Perhaps quicktime uses VBR encoding or sth.? I don’t know.

Would appreciate to hear from you,
Manuel

By: Brett Plymale

Brett Plymale — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 19:13:00 +0000

Very much appreciated! One more thing to note, at least in my case. As it shows above, the Encoding Mode must be set to Faster (Single-pass). Best Quality just doesn’t work.

By: Damon

Damon — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 14:41:48 +0000

Thanks so much. This was really helpful

By: Jonathon McDougall

Jonathon McDougall — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 14:39:04 +0000

Thanks Greg, those instructions could be useful in the future! If you have a number of videos already created, and you want a one-touch solution, you should check out Roxio Popcorn Super easy to use, and also converts DVDs as well as TiVo'd programs.