Display size query, + quality loss from iMovie originals

Learning to work the iDVD process, but what is the word on a foolproof sizing method, such that the thing will display OK on any TV? I don't see any way to restrict display size in iMovie, and what good is the TV Safe check, if you can't control the display size?? Also is quality loss inevitable? I'm compiling the DVD from separate files, less than 1 gb ea. I used "full quality" Quicktime compressed versions from the original iMovie file (which look fine in QT); then pulled those back in to iMovie, then shared to iDVD. One of the files looks fine encoded, but the other has weird sizzling-oil standing wave artifacts, even on still scenes from jpegs. Looking for help/comment/expressions of sympathy
Thanks,
John
Houston TX

Hi v
Quality of the DVD-disc depends on several things.
• Highes Quality isn't Top - better is Best Performances (up to 60 min movie)
confused naming - in iDVD'08 there is Pro Quality AND I like it.
• Media brand - I use Verbatim
• Type: DVD-R my choise no DVD+R or +/-RW
• I save a Disc-Image and burn this at an as SLOW speed as possibly (eg x1) with Toast™
(Disc Util tool can also do this)
• I DON'T USE the function Share/Export to iDVD from within iMovie - IT IS DESTRUCTIVE !!
Just drop the movie project icon (with a Star on it) into iDVD theme window - then iDVD do the
rendering and so much better. Especially if there is photos in the movie.
• Free space on internal (start-up) hard disc - should be about 25Gb when all material is imported
and structured. This for iDVD to work with - iDVD can't use an extern hard disc as scratch.
(less than 5Gb - result is most probably of no use at all)
This is what come's first to my mind.
Yours Bengt W

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Please help. I am making a short experimental film which will show in a gallery in a few weeks. I need the final product to be as high quality as possible. It will be projected on a big screen before an audience. Can I make a high quality DVD from iMovie? I have iMovie 08 and would like to upgrade it to iMovie 11 to get the most features. But I don't want to do a lot of work then find out I can't exhibit the final project properly. I have been reading about iMovie for days on this forum, but I can't get a handle on exactly what is the difference between all the versions. What do you suggest?

I should mention that my movie is made up entirely of still photos with lots of transitions, jump cuts, etc. I don't know if that makes a difference.

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Hi, friends. Can anyone help me clarify this doubts, please?
From analog media to miniDV tape to iMovie DV file, is there any quality loss? If the answer is yes, in which step does the loss happen? In the analog to miniDV or in the miniDV to iMovie DV file or in both steps?
Resulting quality of imported analog footage to iMovie DV file is the same using either the above technique or the pass through technique that skips DV tape use (8mm camcorder media send to Mac through miniDV recorer)?
Thanks in advance.

Hi onClick,
inside your mini-DV camcorder, some chips do the converting "on the fly" - from that moment, you realize no loss, because then, everything is digital, 000 and 111.- so, you shouldn't realize any difference by taping or pass-thru.
in technical terms, DV has a much better quality then analog, but, for sure, any conversion is lossy. DV has a high compression rate, compared to what is done in a professional studio . but for the normal John Doe as us, you will not recognize any loss in quality after converting.
besides: never judge the quality of the pic on your Mac's screen! computers and tv-sets have very different techniques in displaying video! you can just judge pic quality after playout on tape/tv....-

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Having read alot about codecs and converting i'm still not able to figure out why there's quality loss after finalizing my project in Imovie. In the original .MTS files I can see, when played with the VLC player there's a little noise in the grey and dark area's but it's more then acceptable. After converting and finalizing it's a horror to watch. The weird thing is that the converted .MTS into .MOV files look better when played in Miro then in Quicktime.
What advice can you give me on reducing the noise and making sure the movie looks best when played from a DVD on flatscreen? I want to do the editing in the higest possible quality because in the future I want to burn to BluRay aswell (I know that full HD is only possible when you burn to BluRay)
Here are the details:
1. I imported the material, filmed in 25P (so I don't have to interlace) directly from my canon HF200 into Imovie. I can choose between 960X540 or original size.
2. I choose original size and receive a warning that this can cause a negative effect on the quality. So maybe the problem is caused by my old and small laptop, see specifications underneath my questions.
3. The converted mov. files in Imovie appear to have more noise then the original and after finalizing to HD 1080p the noise in the grey and black areas is almost unwatchable.
Is there anything I can do besides buy a new laptop?
Thank you for your help!
Specs Mac
Modelnaam:          MacBook
Modelaanduiding:          MacBook4,1
Processornaam:          Intel Core 2 Duo
Processorsnelheid:          2,1 GHz
Aantal processors:          1
Totaal aantal cores:          2
L2-cache:          3 MB
Geheugen:          4 GB
Bussnelheid:          800 MHz
Opstart-ROM-versie:          MB41.00C1.B00
SMC-versie (systeem):          1.31f1
Intel GMA X3100:
Chipsetmodel:          GMA X3100
Type:          GPU
Bus:          Ingebouwd
VRAM (totaal):          144 MB
Fabrikant:          Intel (0x8086)
Apparaatcode:          0x2a02
Revisiecode:          0x0003
Beeldschermen:
Kleuren-LCD:
Resolutie:          1280 x 800
Pixeldiepte:          32-bits kleur (ARGB8888)
Hoofdbeeldscherm:          Ja
Synchrone weergave:          Uit
Online:          Ja
Ingebouwd:          Ja

No worries Still your remark about the external drive is someting to take in to account, i have mine hooked on most of the time.

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Hello fellow iMovie users.
Yesterday I upgraded to iLife 11 to get the new iMovie and its "new" audio editing capabilities. I could ofcourse just buy it from Mac App Store, but I am principally against App Store and its strict rules, so I choosed to get it the old way.
Anyway, I liked what i saw. Finally the new iMovie was about as good as the five year old one, and had some neat features like chroma key and cropping.
So I decided to start practicing and create a short video based on some old DV-videos filmed with my Canon MV950 DV-PAL camera.
I imported the footage into iMovie, and noticed some significant quality loss after the import.
And it get worse. After I exported the video, it seems like it is heavily compressed, even if I'm exporting to QuickTime and selects the highest quality possible.
I have some screenshots to show you the differences.
This is the original DV-footage.
The imported video. Notice the higher compression and the choppy edges.
And this is the exported video. Notice the insanely bad quality, especially in dark areas.
Is there any way to fix this, or do I have go back to iMovie HD?
PS. Sorry if my post is a bit unreadable. I'm from Norway.

Steve,
While I agree everyone should have owned a HD camera by now, there are a lot of low-end SD cameras that are still being sold today. In this era of our economy, consumers are sensitive to prices; especially low or lower prices.
And unlike the video camcorder boom of the 80s with Sony introducing the Video8 handycam (shoulder mounted camcorder), people today do not video using traditional camcorders. Most either do it through a digital camera, DSLR, iPhone or blogger cameras and are already mostly in an acceptable progressive format. There is nothing wrong with DV style cam. Canon GL-2 and the Panasonic DVX-100 are still commanding such a very high price tag for cameras of older technology and still being repaired goes to show that there are people out there still using it.
If one can convert quality interlaced footage into quality progressive footage, you can use that footage and create good results using iMovie 11. I agree with you and Tom that iMovie 11 captures interlaced footage in full. But what's the use if it can't make a good product in the end that looks like what iMovie 6HD can do and when there are PC software out there including the free Windows Movie Maker that can do this with no problem.
Consumers, unlike some of us, only relate to past software used and are usually benign to the fact of progressive vs interlaced. I have dealt with some mis-informed customers that they believed FULL HD only means 1080p at 60fps; anything else is not. I digress.
With Mac users, they don't necessarily follow the same upgrade frequency as PC users either. Macs generally last a lot longer between upgrades compared to a PC because they don't have to run a barage of virus/spam/anti-malware growing definition files which ultimately slow an otherwise healthy PC down. Macs do not have to worry about this.

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I currently use Elgato's EyeHome to watch MPEG2 (DVD) files on my TV (thus no quality loss).
I have just ordered an AppleTV and would like any advice as to the best bit-rate settings for transcoding MPEG2 to H.264?
1280 by 720, 24 fps, Progressive Main Profile... which bit rate for no quality loss / minimal quality loss?
Many thanks
Rick

Many thanks for your helpful comments.
First, I curently use EyeHome: this is a forerunner to AppleTV and very good. I stream 100% quality MPEG2 (converted from .vob files): so the quality is just as watching a DVD.
Second, the Export to AppleTV preset in Quicktime results in much worse quality. For example, taking a 5 minute sample from a DVD results in MPEG2 file size of 188MB. Export to AppleTV squashes this file to 77MB and a resulting drop in quality.
Third, although h.264 does compress file size better than MPEG2, for the AppleTV, the only (published) setting that does not result in drop of quality in terms of resolution, is to rescale upwards to 720i.
Through experimenting, so far using MPEG Streamclip and bit rate of 4MB/ps results in file size that is slightly larger than MPEG2 (as would be expected due to larger screen resolution) with no noticeable reduction in quality. Bitrate of 3MB/ps results in obvious quality drop. 5MB/ps obviously even better, but not noticeably greater than 4MB/ps.
Thanks for all your help again,
Rick

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Hi there!
I'm getting a quality loss in the form of compression-based square artifacting when I send a piece of lossless footage to Motion from FCP. If there's a loss everytime one sends files, why would anyone use it? Does anyone know how to keep the footage lossless while sending between apps?
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Patrick, thanks so much for your help. You're all really helpful on here!
Exporting in prores still displays artifacts and they show up when I bring it into FCP (regardless of whether I import the clip fresh or have it saved back from a "send").
Here's what I tried:
importing clip directly into a new motion file (not sent from FCP) - movie displays with artifacting - upon rendering, rendered clip still has issue - imported into FCP - still shows artifacting
by importing the motion clip with artifacts into FCP and display in the timeline, FCP changes it's settings to match the clip as usual - I then tried importing the original source clip directly into FCP and when I move it to the timeline, it also shows identical artifacts. However, if I bring in the original clip first, so FCP changes it's settings to match it, the motion clip still shows compression.
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How can I get a higher quality export from Imovie - QT & iDVD came out bad

The playback on my imovie came out corrupted but it transferred ok to Quick Time and I also burned a DVD but the quality is not very good. Any suggestions on how to get a better version. Please keep in mind that the imovie file is huge - 29Gig and the QT file compressed it down to 350Megs. The whole movie is running around 43 minutes. Any suggesstions are appreciated.
iMac Mac OS X (10.4.6)

sorry, dogma, but you compressed your project by a
factor of 1:100, and complain quality... ? did you
use a preset of iM, or did you select any "Expert
Options"?
and hopefully, you didn't try to use that crunched
file for usage in iDVD??
store/save you project in your Movies Folder, launch
iDVD, select from the media bin your project - done.
last questions: is your project set as "mpeg4" or
"dv/NTSC"; did you import from miniDV (what iM is
made for...) or did you use any.. other formats?
happy holidays
Hi - Yep I did use the crunched version for the dvd and have tossed it. I am now transferring a new version from imovie to QT under the pre set of high quality. Since this is the first time I have done a movie I am not sure what settings I would use under expert options - suggestions? I would love to tranfer the imovie right to idvd but at the moment I only have 8G left on my Mac so this would likely be a problem. The movie was exported from a mini DV.

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When I export a dv movie from iMovie to iDVD, the quality drops significantly. A nice clean movie imported from a dv camcorder to iMovie becomes horrible pixelated mess once exported into iDVD and actually burned into a DVD. No matter what quality settings one uses.
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Hi
A.
If You included photos into Your movie and used Share/Export to iDVD. iMovie
asks to render the material = Destructive in two ways:
• Losy iDVD project
• Original iMovie IS HARMED: Photos needs to be re-imported and re-edited.
• Re do the import and editing.
• Close iMovier
• Open iDVD
• Drop iMovie project icon (with a Star on it) into iDVD
Done.
B.
There are a major difference between a Mac Monitor and a Standard TV (much less
sharpness due to 525 - 625 lines (NTSC or PAL))
I connect my Camera to my Mac (via FW) and analog out to a TV so that I can monitor
the process during iMovie editings. (iMovie preferences set Playback via Camera)
Yours Bengt W
Yours

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Ok, I tried what you recommended and the text still wasn't crisp with the short piece exported. I have to scale it because the source is 960x720, and the framerate stayed the same as 30fps. I need this to be crisp and I'm not sure what else to do :/
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Hi,
user5716448 wrote:
... Trying this
REGEXP_SUBSTR ( 'cus_postcode'
, '(\d+)\D*$'
, 1
, 1
, NULL
, 1
'cus_postcode' (inside single-quotes) is the 12-character literal consisting of c, u, s, underscore, p, o, another s, t, another c, another o, d and e. It doesn't contain any digits.
If you want to use a column called cus_postcode, then lose the single-qutoes.
>
where postcode for example DI19 1RI
Would expect 1 - first number after space starting from right but getting blank.
What am I doing wrong?
Thanks

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Hello everyone -- I'm hoping to find an answer that isn't too wildly technical and doesn't discuss the HD aspect of things.
I recently used the Share --> iDVD method and the results were pretty bad. It looked unsaturated, bland, pale, and blah. But any clips with increased contrast or saturation (changed within the editing process) looked jaggy and pixelly. In one clip, I lowered the exposure and brightness of rippling waves in water so they were very dark. It looked great within iMovie, looked like pixellated psychedelic nausea-inducing goofiness after I exported it, and truly appalling on the DVD.
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I'm using an iMac running 10.8.1, Snow Leopard, and iMovie '11. iDVD is 7.1.2
I also have Roxio Toast 10 Titanium.
Also, I used whatever the default settings are to capture the source video from a now-old Canon DV camera. Was that a mistake -- are there special settings I should dig up?
Thanks so much for any help you can offer.
Model Name:          iMac
Model Identifier:          iMac9,1
Processor Name:          Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed:          2.66 GHz
Number Of Processors:          1
Total Number Of Cores:          2
L2 Cache:          6 MB
Memory:          8 GB

Technically, it is a different process.
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Intuitively, it would seem that staying in DV would give better results, but my experience has been the opposite.
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rolesh79 wrote:
.... It seems that the jpeg that iMove creates is too small (in terms of kb) to be of any use. Is there a way for iMovie to create larger, higher quality still photos?
No.
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Display size query, + quality loss from iMovie originals

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