DV clips look bad, good when converted to H.264 in QuickTime and reimported

Question

Still a problem after 7.0.1:
DV camera -> iMovie 08 -> looks bad when playing and exporting/sharing
DV camera -> iMovie 08 -> "reveal in finder" -> clip opened in QuickTime -> looks good -> export as H.264 -> re-import to iMovie 08 -> looks good when playing and exporting/sharing.
In plain words: Importing DV clips from my DV camera into iMovie gives bad results when playing and exporting/sharing. Have tried everything, but the clips look blurry and not sharp at all. The actual DV clip in the events folder looks sharp and clear.
If I take the very same DV clip from the events folder ("reveal in finder"), open it in QuickTime, export it as H.264 and then re-import to iMovie 08, it looks brilliant, retaining the quality the DV clip in the events folder has.
Why can't the DV clips look good in the first place? What is it that iMovie 08 does to these poor clips? Some have suggested re-encoding, re-rendering and so on, but if I do just that in QuickTime and re-import it to iMovie 08, it still looks razor sharp and crystal clear. No reason that iMovie 08 shouldn't handle the DV file in the same manner.
Some have suggested that this is because iMovie 08 internally re-encodes to AIM or H.264, enabling edits with different kinds of formats, but if I do this myself in QuickTime before importing to iMovie 08, the problem isn't there!
If this is difficult to achieve, why not add the option of importing from a DV camera as H.264 and not DV? That would make my day!
(I have posted this to Apple using the feedback menu item in iMovie 08.)
(Background here in these threads:)
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1088568
Sample clips in Apple TV format here:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5173005

Answer 1

iMovie '08 stores rendered projects in H.264 form. This happens when you render to the Media Browser. The rendered file(s) (you can have several different sizes) are in the iMovie '08 project package. The original flies in your Events folders stay in whatever format they were in.
Yes, the movies exported to the Media Browser use the H.264 format, the same as iMovie HD 5/6 did when we exported using the presets Email, Web, Web Streaming and CD-ROM. They were all H.264 too. Apple is obviously putting the (powerful) H.264 to good use to prepare movies for Web pages and other purposes.
As you know, the Full Quality export in 5/6 was to the project's native format, which varied according to the type of project. For DV projects, that was DV video. Everything was converted to DV when imported into the project, and to preserve the original quality we could export to a Full Quality DV movie.
There is nothing like that in iMovie 7, at least that I've seen. As you said, nothing is converted to a "native format" when imported to the project. (Still images are added to the project's single Apple Photo - JPEG "Still Images" movie, which is a nice twist.)
So I think of iMovie 7 as having no "native" format, but a nicely-designed path for using H.264 as the delivery format. The Media Browser — a virtual library of movies with no shared place — is a nice invention.
When I export slideshow movies in DV format out of FotoMagico I always select 'Best' and it DOES make a difference in iDVD.
I think of iMovie 7's problem with DV as more profoundly flawed. Exporting ANY DV video that's in the project to DV or ANY OTHER format is messed up. It's the handling of the DV inside iMovie that's messed up, not just the export to DV.
My guess is — and it's only a guess — that FotoMagico's Best setting adjusts the content of the image delivered for iDVD. Put another way, it prepares an image that works best with iDVD's own encoding algorithms.
One long-standing diappointment I've had with iLife is that Apple has never coordinated the image it prepares for iDVD with what(ever) iDVD does best. It's as if the programmers never talk to each other. iMovie engineers have never asked the iDVD engineers how best to deliver the image to deliver the best quality on the DVD.
Given Apple's emphasis on H.264, one would think that iDVD would be written to embrace any H.264 video and deliver great quality on the DVD. It doesn't. And with iLife '08 it doesn't even embrace iMovie's own DV exports!
I suppose Blu-Ray will change all that, but for now we're stuck with a version of iLife that can't deliver a quality DVD of our home movies.
Karl