Q:Hello Mike. I enjoy your 7x7's very much but I would like to request that you maybe include more horses in your videos. Also, what do you do with all of the clips you use to make your 7x7?

*

ericahampton

Oh, hello Erica. I also enjoy your 7x7s, as for the more horses request, is this your way of telling me it’s time we go back for another horse ride behind Griffith Park? * 

In the last four months that I’ve been recording 7x7s, I have recorded 6.2 hours of footage! This is only counting my iPhone, not my other cameras - this breaks down to: 85 minutes in August, 89 minutes in September, 131 minutes in October, and 69 minutes in November. 

This footage does add up quickly - I use a number of Hazel rules to move older footage off my computer onto external drives, but that’s another post for another time.

Generally, at the end of each month, I go into iMovie, create a blank project, and drag all the clips from the month of, as an example, November, into the timeline. Then I scan through quickly and make sure any clips that are on their side are rotated, and use the Share option to export a full-resolution, 1280x720p, movie. 

Quick Tip : I almost always run this export overnight while I am sleeping - even if this means I set up all the month’s clips in-order on a Wed, and don’t actually get around to hitting Share until Sat’ at 11pm, iMovie has the bad habit of slowing my machine down way too much to deal with a day-time export. 

If you’re recording upwards of 80 minutes of iPhone HD footage each month, then you are going to end up with a rather large exported movie; I use my Vimeo Plus account to privately host my raw iPhone footage exports. 

Unfortunately, this isn’t as easy as just hitting Share and then sending that file off to Vimeo - even with iMovie’s new built-in support for Vimeo. Often the file is far too large for Vimeo’s 2 GBs per file limit, and yes, you could adjust your quality settings in iMovie before hitting export, but again, iMovie can really run my machine into the ground on long exports, so I prefere to use MPEG Streamclip.

This means exporting twice, but, on the plus side, you only have to do it once a month, and using MPEG Streamclip allows you adjust the quality with much, much more control. Meaning, I can make sure the version I’m uploading to Vimeo is 1.98 GBs - loosing as little image and audio quality as possible. Once I have my monthly footage archive, I open up Vimeo Uploader, change my settings to private, and hit upload. 

Top