Photo Booth is an application that comes with Mac OS X 10.5 and higher.
Usage
It is often used to record personal videos, like entries of a video log.
It is a recreational application, not very robust: To do serious recording, it is better to use QuickTime Video Recording or iMovie or dedicated third-party applications.
It is recommended to avoid using other applications during recording, as they can steal computing bandwidth and video quality can degrade.
Formats
On Mac computer with integrated iSight camera, it takes by default video and audio from it. Otherwise, it takes video and audio from any capable device attached to the computer, for example a DV camera connected through Firewire.
Photo Booth movie files always have the same encoding settings, this is one of the Brands detected by Treasured.
Settings for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard
- QuickTime .mov container with video MPEG4 640x480 and audio AAC stereo 44100Hz
- Files are created in ~/Pictures/Photo Booth folder where ~ stands for your home folder.
- Bitrate: 1 to 1.5 Mbit/s, giving file sizes of 7.5 to 11.5 MB per minute.
Settings for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard
- QuickTime .mov container with video H264 640x480 and audio AAC stereo 44100Hz.
- Files are created in ~/Pictures/Photo Booth folder where ~ stands for your home folder.
- Bitrate: 0.3 to 0.8 Mbit/s, giving file sizes of 2.25 to 6 MB per minute.
How to repair a corrupt Photo Booth movie
When a Photo Booth recording is interrupted before completion (for a number of reasons, like battery failure or lack of disk space), the resulting file is unplayable. In most cases, you can recover the movie following a few easy steps:
- Find the damaged file in the ~/Pictures/Photo Booth folder. This is usually the most recent file, and the one that you cannot open.
- Check the size of the file to evaluate the duration of the recorded clip: Sometimes Photo Booth crashes or stops recording well before you notice it, and the damaged movie file contains only the first seconds or minutes of the "show". This can be verified by estimating the duration with the Time Calculator.
- Use Treasured to preview the damaged file.
- Send a Repair Request through Treasured if you are interested in recovering the lost video.
