Exporting file in full quality

I heard a few years ago that when importing video to iMovie, it automatically compresses it in some way. Is this the case?
I want to make sure that whatever footage I import into iMovie via firewire remains the same quality as the source video. Then, when I export that in "Full Quality" with the .DV extension, am I still maintaining the same quality as the original without any loss? Thank you for any advice on this.

M.R. is a 100% right…
in addition:
if you "process" your import in any means, as adding a disolve, a title etc, the file has to be "rendered" => it isn't bit-indentical anymore…
and: iM sets the format automatically to the first import; we read reports about some … ehm… "Voodoo", when you start your project with a still, THEN import from tape… you can set the format manually, NTSC is 30fps, PAL 25fps…

Similar Messages

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

Exporting Video at Full Quality

I made a short 2 minute film in iMovie and I would like to export it to Quicktime with the full quality option. For some reason, when i click it, the blue status bar shows up as if it is working, but the blue on the bar moves incredibly quickly and never reaches the end. Then when I open up the Quicktime file it created, the music from my movie plays, but just a still frame from the movie appears. Anyone know why this is happening? It lets me export it to quicktime in the other forms, just not at full quality.
Thanks!

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

Export to DV FULL QUALITY quality loss

I'm perplexed.
In the past, I have exported to DV without a hiccup, but now I'm having troubles. I need to encode some home videos to Mpeg-2 so I have to use another method than iMovie. I want to export to DV and then encode the video with ffmpegx, Mpeg Streamclip etc... but when I export the 16x9 video "full quality" it is NOT full quality. It looks horrible. When I export it, it looks very blocky - like it's a lower resolution. Of course, when I try to covert the file to another format (in this case mpg) it retains it's "uglyness..."
But the ODD thing is if I take the "poor quality" exported DV and re-import to an iMovie project, it displays properly from within iMovie.
Suggestions?
Tom

Thanks again for your replies. I am using iMovie 6. Here's a couple of snapshot to see what I'm talking about.
The first shot is a capture directly from the .mov reference file within the iMovie file package.
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2332/1799517306181c3840eeo.png
You can see the girl's legs are a little blurry, but with the video running it looks fine.
The second shot is a capture from a full quality .DV export as viewed in VLC. Is that an interlacing issue? The ridges are viewable at all times as objects are in motion in the video
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2230/17986776196cc455506do.png
Thanks for your comments about the high quality checkbox. It helps, but doesn't solve the issue.
Also, I double checked the frame rate and they are both all 29.97.

Cant export AV Self contained but can export QT Conversion Full Quality DV

Having trouble exporting Quicktime movie, "Self-Contained"is checked. Include Audio & Video. It exports about 3/4 of the way and than get general error. I have searched the forum but found nothing that would help. I have exported it using quicktime conversion Full quality Dv and it exports fine and plays fine. But when I import full quality dv back into fce and render it, the last 10 minutes of the 22 minute video has no sound.All music is aiff and all pics are jpeg, tif, And video is all original DV. Have have made several videos using all the same types of format and have never had this problem. Could someone help. Thanks.....Rick

Did you render all and mix down the audio before you attempted to export the movie?
Sequence > Render All > Both
Sequence > Render Only > Mixdown
Do both of them, in order, then save your project, then try exporting again.
What version of QT do you have on your system?

Premier Elements 9 - Exported file, poor sound quality

As it says on the tin really.
Sound quality is fine when in premier elements, sounds like the speakers are broken when I export.
I've tried messing with the properties before exporting but nothing seems to be working. To be fair I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be changing properties wise so it's been mostly trail and error (or mostly error)
Any advice appreciated!!

Open the Audio Meters (under the audio icon on your timeline) and watch them as you play your timeline. Your movie's sound should peak at zero.
It sounds as though your audio is overmodulated (too loud).

Video freezes when exporting to Full Quality

[Background: I've been working on a video project in iMovie HD that I'm doing in pieces - exporting each section of the video at full quality when it's done, so that later I can put them all together in a new project.]
Lately I've been having major problems exporting to full quality Quicktime files. The exported video freezes a few frames in, though the audio continues to play normally. This does not happen if I save it to a smaller quality, say, Web Streaming.
I'm having trouble seeing a pattern in how/why/when this happens, too. I have successfully exported movies to full quality both before and after movies that export incorrectly. The first project that had this happen, I decided to reassemble bit by bit to find out if something specific was causing the problem. Turns out that Full Quality exporting started having this problem if I had added titles. After jumping through something like 50 hoops - exporting little pieces, reimporting, exporting just the titles, etc., etc - I managed to work around the issue. Bit of a headache but all seemed to be well.
BUT, the frozen video problem soon happened again. The next time I had this trouble exporting, there were no titles in the project at all, and the problem instead occurred once I added music. So there does not seem to be a pattern within iMovie itself. This makes me think it's either a Quicktime problem or something to do with my computer itself. I have 2GB of memory, 37GB of space left on my hard drive, and I'm running Quicktime 7.4.1 and iMovie HD 6.0.4.
Please help! I'm on a bit of a deadline, too. This is driving me crazy!

Thanks Matt. I am in the same boat as many people have obviously been in - trying to burn a DVD to a film fest deadline of tomorrow, and after 4 hours of trying to make a disk image, getting 'error during burn'.
I have one question.
a) In imovie, I clicked the 'create iDVD' button to create this project - which has problems burning.
b) Now if I simply try to drag that .mov file into the iDVD pane as you suggest, is that identical to what I have done in a) - in that we're operating with the same basic animal. Of so
c) I should try the process of exporting to .dv, reimporting to new imovie, redoing chapter markers and THEN dragging the package .mov to the iDVD pane - hoping that chapter markers are preserved.
Oh ... someone said one should try to save the .mov as a sel contained file. is that necessary?
Thank you for sitting in front of you Mac!

Widescreen DV, full quality export to .mov?

Hi,
I'm working on a short iMovie project in widescreen dv mode, and I'd like to export it in full quality to a .mov file rather than a .dv file. Is this possible?
Thanks!
Macbook Core 2 Duo Mac OS X (10.4.8)

What does s/he intend to do with the file?
Multiple codec conversions degrade quality (VOB->MP4->DV->?).
If you want minimal quality degradation, you should edit the VOB/MPEG2 file with MPEG Streamclip and convert that to the final codec. Or keep it as MPEG2.
The detour to iMovie loses some quality and you should have converted the VOB directly to DV -- the MP4 step was unneccessary.
iMovie's Full Quality IS .dv! You can make a DV-encoded .mov file, but what's the point? It would be just a wrapper for the same DV thing!

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

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 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

Export Full Quality Preset in iMovie 09?

Does iMovie 09 have a way to export movie in full quality? Can DV source be exported as DV?

If you choose Share --> Export using QuickTime... you can export as DV, as well as a number of other formats, and choose the settings for your export. There is no "Export Full Quality" preset in iMovie '09.

Burning "Full Quality" results in no sound

I've made a movie that is about 2.5 minutes long, it is basically pictures with a couple sound tracks and transitions thrown in. When I export it to Full Quality, the resulting .dv files plays fine from a hard drive, but if I try to put it in a burn folder and burn it to CD, the file from CD has sound for only the first 5 seconds or so.
This is true whether the CD is burned on my Mini or on my MacBook. However, when I exported it as a file for CD and burned it in the same session, to the same blank CD as the full quality version, the smaller file played fine.
Any ideas?
Mini Mac OS X (10.4.9)

I suspect a playback problem, not a movie problem. The movie may be fine, but the DV movie is so large that it can't be played smoothly from a CD. QuickTime is choking when trying to play the DV movie from a CD.
Playback can be comprised by 1) the storage medium — playing from a CD is much harder than playing from a hard drive; 2) the demands of the movie — Full Quality is a large-data movie; and 3) the speed of the Mac processor.
Most likely the CD isn't delivering the data fast enough to play smoothly.
To test the movie itself, drag the movie from the CD back to the hard drive and play it from there. If the movie plays fine, that's the problem.
Karl

Full Quality Output?

Hi,
I realize there are numerous differences between iMovie '08 and previous versions. However, I would hope the ability to output a movie at full .dv quality is still possible... although I have been unable to find the option. Am I missing it, or is it missing from iMovie?
Thanks for any and all help,
TM

However, I would hope the ability to output a movie at full .dv quality is still possible... although I have been unable to find the option. Am I missing it, or is it missing from iMovie?
Probably not in the sense of previous iMovie versions. Previously your clips came in (usually as DV), edits were made that created physical files (fade ins, fade outs, transitions, special effects, title sequences, etc.) which were stored in a reference movie representing the current timeline. At any given time this "timeline" reference movie represented the equivalent of your "full quality" movie. (I.e., the reference movie was essentially a "resource list" of files that when played sequentially was the edited movie.) iMovie '08, however, does not create such physical files during the editing process. Instead, think of iMovie '08 as creating a set of "by reference" instructions which tell how you want the source files to be modified in order to create the final product. No movie is actually created until you "publish" or export one. Thus, in theory, you simply "convert" your source files (in whatever compression format they were imported) to a target compression format for a designated use, complete with all of the "by reference edits" as described in "project" file. Thus, the term "full quality" could describe any compression format that can currently be exported by iMovie '08. It is just too bad that iMovie '08 is not currently capable of exporting directly to an MPEG-2/AIFF compression format which would avoid having to re-compress in iDVD as is currently done with the output of any version of iMovie.
In addition, the term "full quality" has taken on a new meaning in conjunction with GarageBand. iMovie projects opened in GarageBand and "sent" to iDVD are automatically "full quality" since the video content is passed on to iDVD in the same compression format as it was received by GarageBand. The same is also true if you select the "full quality" export option from GarageBand following the chaptering of an iMovie project. For instance, you can export an iPhone version of your project, open it in GarageBand, chapter it, and then export it as "full quality." In this case, the original M4V video and AAC audio are simply placed in an MOV file container along with the chapter text tract. In fact, if you really want to get fancy, you can now even add an alternate audio channel (haven't checked to see if this can now be done in GarageBand as I normally use QT Pro to set alternate audio channels), and play back the clips with alternate audio selection using the updated iPhone software.

Full Quality Movies Issue

Is there a way to export a full quality movie in .mov format instead of .dv?
I need to upload it but my video uploading website doesn't accept dv files. And I need the file in full quality.

Yes, just export as QuickTime in a .mov wrapper with the DV codec and take care to use the correct resolution, DV-codec subtype, audio sampling rate, and aspect ratio. Then the quality will be the same as in a plain .dv stream (that forces those settings to the correct values).
...but DV is BIG, about 200 MB/minute. Do you really want to upload that??
H.264 would be a good quality and a more compressed format.

Exporting file in full quality

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