Export "full-quality" in iMovie '09.

Using iMovie HD, I used to export my footage as a full-quality QuickTime movie so I could archive it to disk and access it later. However, in iMovie '09, the "full-quality QuickTime" preset seems to have been removed.
What export settings in iMovie '09 will allow me to achieve the highest possible quality? I'd like to archive my footage to disk so that I'll always have a digital file to work with.
Thank you.

Welcome BarrenRegions to the  iMovie boards ..
no way to answer that question.. you have to compare apples with peaches.. (German proverb):
iMHD≥6 was a dv-only editor (and AIC, but this is another story...); it handles dv lossless.. frequent contributor lennart once made a test of ex- and reimporting a few dozends time the same clip = no loss of pic quality.
now iM08/09:
it handles dv not as dv internally anymore; therefore it accepts lots of other codecs (mp2, avchd, h264...).. so, depending of your source, the export can be lossy.
we have mile-long threads about that, search for posts from Steve Mullen and Euisung Lee who did research this issue +ad nauseam+
as far as I followed that discussion: there's a 'trick', to convert - after import into iM08/09 - the imports to AppleIntermediate with tools as QTpro or Mpeg Streamclip. that blows-up size, but forces iM08/09 to keep quality a 100%...
.. sorry for being less helpful, even as a 'Silverback' on this board, all that is +a bit+ beyond my skills, needs and understanding.. to be honest: I switched awhile ago to FinalCutExpress, and will use iM09 when I'll get a new rec-device.. hopefully this year (Santa! do you listen?!...)

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Export Full Quality Preset in iMovie 09?

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2. When exporting in full quality is it really full quality as on the miniDV-tape or has iMovie made any changes to the video or compressed it in any way?

Hi
1. Second monitor on Mac port - Don't know I do like this.
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• connect TV or referens monitor to analog out on Camera
• in iMovie pref set Playback via Camera
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How do I export to DV "Full Quality" in iMovie 2009?

The old iMovie used to have a full quality export that would produce a .dv file.
Newer versions of iMovie have a "DV Stream" option, with settings (Progressive, Interlaced, Audio rate, etc.)
I want an absolute, full quality archive of my iMovie project, as sharp and perfect as I see it in iMovie. None of the DV Stream options seem to produce that. The titles look jagged, for one thing.
I want to export my iMovie project so that if I need to re-import it later into iMovie, no quality is lost. I don't care how big the files are, I want FULL QUALITY.

Thanks for breaking this down for me, Sheryl, and thanks to everyone who took time to read my quest and fire off suggestions.
I will look for the AIC export option and try to select the maximum quality settings available for it, and then hand that resulting file to my producer.
I have an old Mac with iMovie HD on it, so I will also try importing the AIC export into that and the exporting to DV, as that DV seems like it would be better quality than the DV coming out of iMovie 09. (I seem to remember doing DV exports back in 2006 and being quite happy with the results, which is why this process has been so confusing for me now.) If the producer NEEDS a DV file, I reckon that's the best I can give them right now.
The consolidate project option sounds VERY COOL. I had no idea that was possible! For working between Mac users, that might be just the ticket I need. That also sounds useful when trying to throw away all the extra, unused footage and just keep the parts of the footage that I actually ended up using, but may want to tweak titles and effects later.
Long term, it sounds like I am going to have to transition to FCE or FCP. I will go surf the Web for reviews and impressions of it. I'd be happy to hear more about people's opinions. Investing time, energy and money into a new tool does not appeal to me, but I am definitely going to need full quality DV exports sometimes (anytime we want to get our PSA on the local television channel, for one).
I guess iMovie is still useful for my mini-YouTube fun time projects, (my latest: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9TrAZ4yCDQ), but it is a shame that it can't produce something in which the future-proofing is limited only by source quality, not the software's output quality.
(I don't mind limitations based on source quality, them's the breaks! But potentially losing source quality forever because of shackled software is... GAH unforgivable.)
-D

Overlap transitions choppy after exporting 'Full Quality' QuickTime

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I have solved ALL my issues!! At least with this project. I had 3 issues with this project: low res on final output, flickering in the images while using Ken Burns effect and not so smooth transition issues.
I changed my video format to HDV 1080i. I was able to use my lower res untouched images (before I put a .6 Gaussian blur effect on the images to reduce the amount of flickering and saved them as high res TIFFs). I did have to change to widescreen format, but I think my client will see that as a cool factor. I'm so happy I could cry!!! It took me a week to get it figured out, but I learned A LOT about iMovie during that time. Now I have a bunch of project ideas flying through my head. I'm going to enjoy my happy moment for a little while. I still do not know why iMovie was doing the weird transition thing in the iSight format. I think I'll stick with the HDV.
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Serena

Exporting full quality problem.

i shoot my movie in 16:9 on my sony camcorder. everything works perfectly in regards to editing and transfering to iDvd. the one thing i noticed that was weird is 2 days ago i made a short clip. about 5 minutes in 16:9 format. got it in and edited it in iMovie. so then i wanted to export it twice. once to put on youtube. i exported for webstreaming and it was fine. then another i wanted to export in full quality so i could send it to my brother to watch on his TV (he is in cali). but when i exported it into full quality it went back and squished it into a box format and not widescreen. so i fiddled around with "advanced" and got it to export 16:9 but the quality didnt look very good.
how can i get it to export perfectly widescreen at full quality? Thank you.
PS. I hope i make sense.

Hi
*Not knowing the origin to Your problem - General approach when in trouble is as follows.*
• Free space on internal (start-up) hard disk if it is less than 10Gb should rather have 25Gb
• Hard disk is untidy. Repair Permissions, Repair Hard disk (Apple Disc Util tool)
• Garageband-fix. Start it, Play a note and Close it. Re-try (Corrects an audio problem that hinders iMovie)
• Delete iMovie pref file - or rather start a new user/account - log into this and re-try
iMovie pref file resides.
Mac Hard Disk (start-up HD)/Users/"Your account"/Library/Preferences and is named. com.apple.iMovie.plist
While iMovie is NOT RUNNING - move this file out to desk-top.
Now restart iMovie.
• Third party plug-ins that doesn't work OK (not relevant for iMovie’08 or 09)
• Program miss-match. iMovie 5.0.2, up to Mac OS X.4.11 AND QuickTime 7.4.1 - is OK
• Program miss-match. iMovie 6.0.3 or 6.0.4, Mac OS X.4.11 AND QuickTime 7.4.1 - is OK (might work under Leopard)
• Program miss-match. iMovie’08 v. 7.0.1, Mac OS X.4.11 AND QuickTime 7.4.1 - is OK (might work under Leopard)
• Screen must be set to Million-colors
From LKN 1935. (in this case = iMovie HD (5), I tried it all, but nothing worked.
Your answer (above) has been helpfull insofar as all the different trials led to the conclusion that
there was something wrong with my iMovie software. I therefore threw everything away and reinstalled
iMovie from the HD. After that the exportation of DV videos (there has not been any problem with HDV videos)
to my Sony camcorders worked properly as it did before.
Yours Bengt W

Aspect ratio when exporting full quality -- is this a bug?

Hi,
I'm new to iMovie. I'm really enjoying playing around with it and think it's a really nice tool and very intuitive. But there's one thing that is bothering me. I'm working with 16:9 aspect ratio (Widescreeen) as the project type which corresponds to how the movies were recorded (a Canon MVX4i or Optura 600 in the USA I think). Everything works fine until I try to export in full quality format (using Export). The .dv file only plays back in 4:3 aspect ratio. I tried using the Expert settings, with 16:9 set and both PAL and NTSC but QuickTime and Preview still only see the movie in 4:3 aspect. If I understand correctly, the aspect ratio is just a flag that is set somewhere.
Is this a bug or am I missing something? I don't have QT Pro by the way?
One more question: in expert settings for DV Export settings, does anyone have a recommendation for what I shold pick for DV Format, and Scan mode?
Thanks very much in advance,
David
Powerbook G4 Mac OS X (10.4.4)

Hi David,
This isn't entirely unique to DV. But in simplistic terms what happens is that the widescreen footage that you capture with your camera is the same resolution as square screen. The number of pixels (the dots that make up the picture) for PAL, which is the format used in Portugal I believe, is 720 x 576.
The pixels are squashed into a kind of oblong shape but then when played on widescreen kit the pixels become square causing the picture to stretch sideways. When you view the footage in QT it simply shows the picture as is - meaning that it outputs the picture as 720x576 with the oblong display.
However, when you view the footage in iMovie there's a flag in the file that tells iMovie that the footage is wide and therefore to stretch it accordingly.
There's a differing opinion of whether this display difference in QT is a bug or a feature. As Dan says, if you want to display widescreen footage in QT you're better off exporting a widescreen QT movie using the expert settings:
From within iMovie...
- Select File --> Export from the menu
- In the Quicktime section choose Compress Movie For "Expert Settings"
- Click the Share button
- In the save dialog box that pops up Select "Movie to QuickTime Movie" in the Export section
- Click Option...
- In the Movie Settings dialog box click on settings
- Select DV - PAL from the compression type
- Keep the Frame Rate at Current
- In the Compressor settings choose your Quality
- Set the scan mode to Interlaced
- Set the Aspect Ratio to 16:9 ( this is the bit that tells QT to play in widescreen)
- Click OK
- In the sound section click the Setting button
- In the sounds settings dialog box set the Format to Linear PCM
- Set the channels to Stereo (L R)
- Set the Rate to 48.000kHz
- Set the Sample Rate Converter settings to Quality Normal and the Linear PCM Settings to a sample size of 16 bits.
- Uncheck all the other options (Little Endian, Floating Point and Unsigned)
- Click OK
- Uncheck the Prepare for Internet Streaming box
- Click OK and set a destination for your file.
- Click save to compress the file.
The resulting file that is created above should now show in QT as widescreen. However you should bear in mind that you should work off the raw DV file rather than this new created one in iMovie. As a rule of thumb you should be thinking a little bit about the output media of the file. So for example if your final output medium is DVD then you can continue to work in iMovie and iDVD without problem. If you want to create a QT file for viewing on your computer then it's advisable to create a seperate QT file for this pupose.
If you'd like to know a little more about the way aspect ratios works here's some links for you:
Wikipedia
World easiest explanation of anamorphic 16:9
Hope this makes a little more sense now and sorry if I've covered stuff you already know. Hopefully this information will be of use to you but post back if you need more help.
Cheers.
David.
PowerMac G4 Dual 1.25Ghz / 1GB RAM Mac OS X (10.4.5) PowerBook 12" 1Ghz / 768MB RAM

White pillar box when I export full quality

Hi all,
So when I try to export my iMovie 06 project as a full quality .dv file, the resulting file has a white pillar box on the right side. See pic:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/8496008@N03/2268735670/
Any ideas what might be causing this? Are there any workarounds? It didn't used to do this, maybe it was the 10.5.2 update?

Any ideas what might be causing this? Are there any workarounds? It didn't used to do this, maybe it was the 10.5.2 update?
Can you post a screen capture of the source file info as displayed in the QT Player "Inspector" window? (Or a sample snippet of the source file?)

Exporting full quality

Everytime I export my movie using Full Quality DV the end result is not as crisp as the original. I even exported a clip with no edits and the exported clip doesn't look as good.
Is this loss of quality what I'm supposed to expect everytime I export my movies? Remember I'm always exporting using "Full Quality" option.
Thanks for the help.

Hi guys,
thanks for the replies. I recorded the clip with iMovie and opened the package and extracted the dv clip to use with Pro-Tools. Once in Pro-Tools I realized that the video was not complete so I went back to iMovie, completed the video and created a new quicktime file at "Full Quality".
Once I imported this new clip back in Pro-Tools the video was not as crisp as the original. I didn't do any edits other than to put clip 1 right next to clip 2 and export at full quality. Just wondering if this is normal for iMovie.
Thanks!
--carlos

How to export full quality in photos

In iPhoto you used to be able to export a modified picture in 'current' quality, which was full quality as shown in iPhoto.
Now in the new photos app this option is gone (only allowing to export original image in full quality). The best now seems to be exporting the jpeg at maximum quality which it's compressing the image from what is seen in photos app.
Does anyone know how to get around this...incredibly annoying as I want to edit images in photos, then export out that full quality to share or print or whatever.

You misunderstand what 'quality' means in this context. Quality is about the amount of compression applied to the image when the Jpeg is created. Is had very little to do with the quality of the photo. A well exposed image will print pretty much the same from a 1, 2 or 5mb image, especially from a domestic printer. You might see artefacts on a very high quality printer, but it's really not that mooch different.
Jpeg quality really comes into play if you use a lossless editor after exporting. This is in the nature of the Jpeg format. It's not an image format at all, it's a compression format attuned to images. Essentially its a special kind of zip file. When you open a Jpeg it's decompressed, so that 5mb Jpeg could contain a file that uses 50mb of RAM.
However, if you edit the image, then the file is recompressed and that means that some data is thrown away. In theory, edit a Jpeg enough times and you'll have an empty file. To overcome this, when you edit in apps like iPhoto/Photos the original file is not touched. The edit decisions are recorded in the db and only committed to the file when exported.
Exporting create a new file, containing the same photograph. But the quality of the file - which is the amount of compression applied - can be selected. If you found that the Preview in iPhoto always matched the reported size of the original then either a: that was a fluke or b: the image wasn't edited.
Medium gives about the same quality as the Preview, that's all.
The best quality to export at depends on the next use the file gets: if it's going to editing further, then high. Other than that it doesn't make a huge amount of difference.

Exporting FULL DV from iMovie '08.

Can't for the life of me find where to export my movie in full DV quality so that I can then put it on DVD for TV playback. iMovie '06 used to have a setting for Export to iDVD which is now gone...What am I missing.

Thanks for re-posting that interesting example, David.
I remember being baffled when I first saw that example, and still cannot explain how the results you see are so different from mine. I hope we can figure it out.
For the sake of readers, I'll say that David edits in the PAL video world while I edit in the NTSC world. Perhaps that makes a difference here, I don't know.
He also may be shooting 16:9 DV video while most of my tests are 4:3.
1. Here, all the DV source video exported by iMovie '08 to DV — or exported to any other video format — NEVER looks as sharp as your "good" picture, David. Here, the exported video is always fuzzier than the source video and there's nothing I do can make it sharp.
That is not true for you?
2. Here, setting the High Quality feature of the exported movie does not affect playback quality.
3. Using QT Pro's Save As command or Export command doesn't improve the quality either, no matter what High Quality setting I use. And the new movie is the same size as the original. (We should probably avoid drawing any conclusions about the movie size for there are both QuickTime bugs and Finder bugs that confuse the issue.)
To summarize, the export of DV material here is always fuzzier than the source material and there's nothing I can do to improve it.
Some thoughts:
1. Setting my QuickTime Player preference to always use High Quality also affects the display of the movie settings in the Video Settings window. Even though the movie has not been saved with the HQ setting turned ON, the window shows it as turned ON. This can be confusing. To avoid this, we can turn off the QuickTime Player preference.
2. The content of your sample photo suggests the movie was edited in iMovie 6. (iMovie '08 doesn't offer that title, if I recall.) Is it possible iMovie 6 is "contaminating" the results somehow?
3. What you describe is exactly what happens if a) my QuickTime preferences are not set to show High Quality; and b) the exported movie was exported by iMovie 6.
Any other clues what's going on?
Karl

Export full quality DV

I am thinking of upgrading to FCE. Here is my question. Instead of exporting to tape is it possible to export a finished project to a DVD disk ,not in DVD format (MPG-2), but in the same file type as yoou would put on the tape. In other words, I need tape quality but do not have a dv tape recorder and would like to use a DVD disk as transport media. Is this possible or am I just being stupid.
Would be using FCE 2
Thanks for all you help.

I will be doing short (30-60 seconds spots) so they should fit on a DVD. . . I think
Thank you for your response. . . I love the board. You always get the help you need.

Export full quality Avi 640x480 30 fps?

Hello,
What is the best way to export to .avi, 30 frames p/s and dimensions of 640x480. I am having difficulty defining the video dimensions. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you,
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FILE>EXPORT>QUICKTIME CONVERSION.
Click on OPTIONS, and choose your codec. Also, in the VIDEO section, there is a spot for you to set the dimensions. Just choose CUSTOM.
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"There's no need to fear, UNDERDOG is here!"

IMovie full quality export problem...

Hello,
I filmed a widescreen video with a mini dv cam, which runs flawlessly smooth and clear as a bell at full screen in iMovie... but when I export it in either a full quality .dv, or the highest quality .mov and play them at nearly full screen in Quicktime, the playback is choppy.
How do I export a copy of my video that plays as smooth as it does in iMovie?
Thanks!

I am using the expert settings for quicktime export
If you want full quality, then you must use the Full Quality preset.
The expert settings don't export full quality even if you choose .dv output:
http://www.sjoki.uta.fi/~shmhav/iMovieHD_6_bugs.html#expertsettings
But that doesn't fully explain your original problem, though.
Disclaimer: I don't benefit from the link.

Export "full-quality" in iMovie '09.

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