SX40 poor quality videos

My SX40 has never given very good videos, at any resolution. I figured it was just the nature of the beast, but I have seen some demos recently on YouTube of videos from SX40 that are phenomenal. It is 2 years old and never did work like I expected it to.
Is it possible I am doing something wrong? I tried every possible setting I can think of. Problems:
videos are very grainy
when I move the camera, there is horizontal shimmy or waving in the video when chromcasting, but not on the computer monitor
the camera seems to jitter or rock subtly vertically as if I am shaking it. I tried with and without stabilization
quality is no where near what I have seen on demos on YouTube. Seems like poor refresh rate, but I don't know how to access this parameter.
Hope someone can help. Can Canon fix this? Or should I toss it and try a NIkon?

olowkow,
My experience with video is pretty limited, but I have found that I really need to use a tripod with a very smooth operating head to help eliminate the shimmy/waving effect that you are seeing. Not sure from your description if you are using one or not. As far as the graininess, that sounds like the ISO might be too high or that there isn't enough light available to assist with the camera focusing.
I hope some other members can shed some better insight for you on this.
Steve M.

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Poor quality video and choppy

When I import into imovie with my Sony DCR TRV130 handy cam the quality is poor it is also choppy and speeds up at times. When i connect it directly to the television,it looks fine and the replay speed is fine.
New Imac 121 Gig free
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Transfer via firewire
imovie 08
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Make sure the QuickTime Player is set to high quality playback.
With the QuickTime Player running, select QuickTime Player>Preferences>General and make sure the 'Use high-quality video setting when available' box is checked.

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They lose a lot of resolution...
they have to ...
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video means also: iMovie uses internally "dv" as videocodec (as on miniDV tapes...)… what codec is inside the .avi you're producing on your PC? .. as you probably know, avi (in the Apple world: mov) is just a container, some say "wrapper".. can contain many formats&codecs, which look good in playback, but lose quality when processed in iM.. as said: stay with dv...
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last word about quality:
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Poor quality video after imovie imports it

I have reasonably good quality video (Video DivX 6.0, 640x480, 29.97 fps, Audio: uLaw 2:1, Mono, 8000 Hz) ) which when viewed on my imac in QT looks good. I then import into imovieHD and the quality reduces (lower res and flatter contrast).
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So my question is, given that imovie seems to only use DV (converting all other formats), how to I convert my videos to DV without quality loss (I have all the usual 10.5 software and also TOAST)
Hope somone can help, been banging my head against this for a while now.

At it's heart, iMovie is a DV editing application. When you look at the big picture there are two fundamental video files: those that are meant to be edited and those that are meant to be distributed (youtube, DVD etc). You have a "distributed" file that you wish to edit. This simply means there will always be obstacles and loss of quality. As example, a DV file = 13GB/hour. This is compressed for distribution (commonly using iDVD to create a DVD which only holds 4.3GB). The more compressed the file is, the more quality is going to suffer.
Your file is very compressed and I think you are barking up the wrong tree. What is it you want to do with your file inside of iMovie? I believe there are Divx editing applications out there that will perform simply cuts- but I think they are Windows only. I didn't see anything that would do more than simple cuts, probably because all the individual frame information is gone via compression (which is why iMovie wants an individual frame format).
I may have an MP3 a friend gives me of a orchestra performance. The original recording took place in a studio, mastered via a huge 48-track console. I may want to go back and extract just the trumpet- easy enough with the source material- but not something that can be realistically done with a very compressed MP3.
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I'm having problems embedding video content in a pdf whilst retaining its quality. I have a presentation document at A3 size in indesign, on which there is a video on the page at 400x224mm (or 1138x638px if I change the unit of measurement.
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Thanks for your swift response Dave, really appreciate the help.
We looked into using a floating window, but the documents are for sending out to clients without knowing what size of screen it will be viewed on. This meant that in certain circumstances the poster frame would sit larger on the page than the video itself, creating a bit of an odd composition.
The widget sounds very useful, although I'm hesitant as it would need to be rolled out across a large number of computers in our organisation. So I'm keen to explore any other alternatives (if there are any!) first.
You mentioned:
"The default video player widget embedded into PDFs by Acrobat and InDesign always scales the content proportionally to fit the Flash Player viewport, so if the video is smaller than the actual pixel dimensions of the viewport it will be enlarged.'
Since we tried creating the video at the exact dimensions of the media box do you know why it is still rescaling it? I've heard there's a bit of a discrepancy between indesign and acrobat with pixels vs vectors, but have never quite got my head round it.
Let me know if you can advise further,
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ATR,
Thank you for helping me out.
To answer your questions:
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I was told that product specs require 4:3 aspect ratio for DVD. (Unfortunately footage was all shot in 16:9 before I found out about the 4:3 finished requirement.) I want to generate the highest IQ possible in this format.
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Image Size: 1920x1080
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Hi all,
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Sorry for the lack of details, I was somewhat looking for a decent online guide but I'd also appreciate any advice as well.
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Imovie to Quicktime to FLV = poor quality video...how to improve

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2.W/ FLV crunch converter software Convert file into FLV.
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The good news is this works, the bad news is the quality of video is very poor. Any ideas on how I could improve the video quality?

When you are talking "Quality" you are basically talking about the amount of incoming data required for one set display size... that's the video bitrate (the minimum amount of data flowing into the video player to continue the display uninterupted).
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Here is a little background info on bitrate as it relates to display size:
Video bit rate
One of the principle of goal setting is to "Begin with the end in mind". In this case it'll be very hard to give good recommendations because the end is not defined. So I'll just make a few assumptions and you can correct me as needed.
First, I'll assume that since you are converting to Flash, you want to deliver this video over the Internet. If that's true, then we'll have to make some assumptions on the Internet connection download speeds of your potential viewers. Let's just say that most have at least a 1.5Mb connection or faster.
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In the same way, a video displayed at 640 X 480 pixels will require 4 times the bitrate as a video displayed at 320 X 240 pixels to produce the same quality. So for example a video with a bitrate of 100kbps, displayed at 160 X 120 will produce the same quality results as a video with a bitrate of 1600kbps if displayed at 640 X 480.
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Sound like your audio settings are fine, especially for Internet delivery.
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Best wishes,
Adninjastrator

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You can play HD videos with excellent quality on the Macbook Air. It must be either a problem with the video itself or the player.

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Winston Churchill wrote:
I've just carried out a few tests using iPlayer.
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You cannot.
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There is a balance here in terms of video quality and large bandwidth requirements. When you have 500 attendees on a server simultaneously and video at high resolution you would see huge bandwidth issues so this is something that has to be managed.
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IDVD. Poor quality video in drop zones

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Every video looses quality. They "blink/jump". For example the eyebrows or cheeks of people jump up and down and are very noticeable. It's as if the footage has been scaled up from a smaller image.
Does anyone know how to handle this? Is there a workaround?
This issue has been adressed before, and it seems there's no solution:
https://discussions.apple.com/message/1902931#1902931
https://discussions.apple.com/message/21604603#21604603
https://discussions.apple.com/message/10396039#10396039
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Just tested the drop zone in the same theme that you posted with a video created with PhotoPresenter and it was very sharp.
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2 - delete the contents of IDVD'S cache folder: User/Home/Library/Caches/com.apple.iDVD.
3 - launch IDVD and try again with a new project with the same theme.
NOTE: In Lion and Mountain Lion the Home/Library folder is now invisible. To make it permanently visible enter the following in the Terminal application window: chflags nohidden ~/Library and press the Return key - 10.7: Un-hide the User Library folder.
If you're running Mavericks, 10.9, go to your Home folder and use the View ➙ Show View Options menu to bring the this window:

SX40 poor quality videos

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