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From my experience I've had the best luck just using ffmpeg from the command line. It's not as hard as it sounds. I'm not sure what formats iMovie will take, but it's probably a safe bet to assume it can handle Apple's Quicktime .mov format. You'll want to run ffmpeg with a command like

ffmpeg -I [inputfile.avi] -b 1000 outputfile.mov 

By default it'll output lossy, but with the bitrate set to 1000 there really shouldn't be any noticeable ugliness. (And if there is, just bump it up to 2000.) If you need lossless (or the default codec isn't compatible with iMovie for whatever reason), you can set the video codec with the -vcodec flag, followed by a codec. I'd opt for "qtrle" as the codec in that case, as it'll be smaller than uncompressed video. The command would look like

ffmpeg -I [inputfile.avi] -vcodec qtrle outfile.mov

The filesize will also be huge, so unless you've got gigabytes to spare I'd just go for high-bitrate lossy. (A 2 minute video I was testing was 7MB at a bitrate of 500 vs. 544MB using qtrle, just as a benchmark). Hopefully this will work better than Handbrake has been.

RibShark, on 30 May 2015 - 02:49 PM, said:

What format is the path in? No matter what I give it it just seems to cause the game to crash.

I've just went ahead and looked through a copy of the 2004 edition.

Turns out that all the changes ARE in the .EXE, plus a few added sound files and the music. Here's the most major changes/things of note I've found: (I've also put a slightly more detailed version of this list on The Cutting Room Floor, for those interested.)

• Game now requires DirectX 9, as opposed to the old version that only needed DirectX 6. It still visually looks identical to the old version, but it runs better on modern hardware.
• DirectDraw support was completely dropped. As in the code for it has literally been removed.
• Weird visual scaling artifacts on bitmaps (time, minimap, etc) appear to be gone.
• Input works on modern systems without requiring a Direct3D windower or a debugger. It still ignores input if the game is launched while the input is on another window, though.
• Game no longer crashes on systems with high CPU speeds.
• Game no longer crashes when you lock the screen or open a UAC prompt on Vista+.
• The button to get to the menu for the graphics options was removed. If you memory hack your way there, all the typical graphics functions still work with the exception of the screen resolution, which is stuck at 640x480.
• In-game, you can still change the draw distance with F1 and F2. However, the "Very Far" cap has been removed, meaning you can set the draw distance to absurdly high levels.
• The hidden Networking screen has been removed. You can still view it's hidden menu item via memory hacking, but selecting it crashes the game.
• Due to DirectDraw and networking being gone, the .EXE is now only 512KB as apposed to 1.20MB.
• Game now has music. It is loaded from "*.SON" files on the CD, which are really just uncompressed raw audio files. (signed 16-bit little-endian 44100Hz stereo raw audio files, in fact.) These take up ~500MB on the disk. (The game itself only takes up ~80MB.)
• Sound files "Waterfall.WAV", "beach.WAV" and "flame.WAV" were added, which play when the player is near certain objects in the game. This is a feature from the Saturn version that never made it over to the PC until now.
• The various debugging strings that were littered throughout the .EXE are still there, meaning it's still just as easy to disassemble. In addition a lot of strings are around pertaining to which file the error came from. This gives us a good idea of how the dev environment was set up.
• Just quickly running it through IDA it seems the codebase is quite a bit cleaner. Functions are generally smaller and less spaghetti-like (but keep in mind it's still not by much; in fact it's probably just due to DirectDraw being dropped.)

All in all besides the compatibility increases it's not THAT different. It's not any easier to hack than the 1998 edition (still crashes with large character models; file paths and offsets are still hardcoded, etc.) but it runs better. If you can port over the fixes, there really won't be any major differences whatsoever besides the 3D audio stuff and the missing display modes.

I'm gonna deviate from the norm here a bit in suggestions.

Probably the most important thing you could do it make the text work with the background. Right now you've just got the left row crossing that black border and it just looks weird. I'd flip around the levels and the act/player selections so that the levels are all over top the white section and the player/act selection in the black part. Sorta like this: (Also messed with the palette a little. More desaturated.)


Now I'm going to get a bit radical here. We're talking minor ASM tweaks here. (Swap the palette/possibly art that's loaded when you switch characters.) Not saying that you need to (or even can) follow this advice, but I think it'd be neat if you could pull it off.

Make the characters in the background silhouettes, except the one that's selected. That way you both have increased readability of the text and an easy way to tell who you're playing as.
Here's some examples of what I'm talking about:




You could even experiment with color, too.


Just throwing some ideas out there. Hopefully it'll steer you in the right direction.

I feel like we'd be aware of something like Green Hill Zone being blue.