High def on my iMac, but low quality on MacBook :(

I did a screen capture and exported it as HD. Imported it into iMovie for some editing and then exported as HD. Looks crystal clear on my iMac and really low quality on my MacBook Pro. Both computers are new within the year, not old. These are for my Photoshop tutorials which I sell. I claim that these videos are crystal clear and will play sharp as a tack on your computer. Will they or will they not? Help!

P.S. Could it be that I did the screen capture on my 21" imac and then finished the editing in iMovie on my 15" MacBook? I recorded on a big screen and edited on a little one? I can't figure this out! Didn't happen with any others.

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17 Inch G4 iMac displaying low quality grainy graphics on web pages

I'm having a very sudden problem with my iMac. Images on web pages are displaying very grainy and low quality. This is not an issue with images on my iPhoto or new images I upload from my digital camera. I have tried loading web pages on Safari, Firefox, and Google Chrome and any web page I pull up is displaying fuzzy, grainy, low quality images. Does anyone know how I can fix this?

I'm sorry no one has jumped on this in two days. I think you have us stumped. I've tried changing some video settings on several of our G4 Macs but that either affects all image apps or doesn't simulate the problem.
Can you post an image? If you host the image or upload it to a image storing/sharing site, you can insert it in a post by using the instructions in this user-contributed yip:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=121950&tstart=0
Help me here--You say this problem persists in *Google Chrome*. My understanding is that Chrome has always required an Intel processor and OS 10.5 or later. 10.4.11 and a G4 iMac don't cut it. Is this a typo or is this problem associated with a Mac other than the G4 in your equipment line?

Airport express works when accesed from my Imac but fails from my MacBook

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You might want to give Printopia a try. There is a free trial period, so you will know if this works in about 60 seconds.
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Iphoto not updating on OSX iMac but is on a Macbook Pro

My other half has a Macbook Pro, and his iPhoto is on version 9.4. He did not purchase this version. My iMac still says iphoto is 8.1.2. No upates are available, so does anyone know why a Macbook Pro has updated iPhoto, but iMac does not. Both were puchased in the same year! Updates are always downloaded. What is going on??

Terence
Thanks for the reply. Only new to Apple these last few years and still getting used to it all!
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I can send email on my iMac but not on my Macbook Air or Macbook Pro.

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All three are connfigured exactly the same way and I am using the Mail program that came on the system. Any help will be greatly appreciated. I am using embarq mail.

When is it time to invest in a high-def editing setup?

I own a ten year old digital editing appliance that I'm considering replacing with Final Cut Pro. I want to start work on some niche documentaries that I plan to sell online. I made one documentary at home about six years ago that I still sell online.
I've never bought a HD TV because I don't watch broadcast television. I find conventional DVDs on high-def screens very grainy in image quality ... downright unwatchable ... so to this day I still watch all my DVDs (homemade and store-bought) on a big tube television set.
Personally, I don't want a high-def TV for watching old movies and 70's TV shows on DVD. I'm perfectly happy with my tube TV, my 2001-era editor, and my twelve year old standard-definition Sony PD150 cancorder which I just had serviced and cleaned.
Heck, 20% of my viewing pleasure still comes from videocassettes, which I can get at the Goodwill for 25 cents a piece.
But ... now... I have some ideas for some new niche video products. Only problem is ... I haven't followed the conversation about high-def at all. I'm wholly and utterly ignorant. Pretty much all I know is that BluRay won the format war … and I know I can look up 720p, 1080p, 1080i should that information become important.
That's the extent of my knowledge. I honestly have no idea whether my Sony PD-150, my old editor, and single-layer DVDs would be just fine ... or whether they would result in a bunch of refund requests when I start selling these new DVDs I want to make.
God help me. I just don't keep up with what other people are doing.
And googling "do-I-need-to-dump-my-90's-era-digital-camcorder-and-standard-definition-editing- appliance-in-favor-of-ten-thousand-dollars-worth-of-new-high-def-cam-and-editing -gear-if-I'm-going-to-make-another-sellable-DVD" didn't really yield much.
Can anyone help me here?
1) Is anyone in the lower-mid-range video business … like a budget wedding guy or a niche how-to video … still using standard-def stuff to churn out acceptable product in high volume?
I've sold hundreds of copies of my DVD online and two weeks ago I got my first ever refund request … the guy berated me for selling a DVD in standard definition when (he said) the "commercial standard" now is high-def. No one else has ever complained. So now I'm left wondering if this guy is the first of a new generation of customers who would not tolerate a standard-def product … or if he's just a dork who needed to complain about something.
2) How does manufacturing a high number of copies of a high-def video work? My 50-minute standard-def movie fit wonderfully on an inexpensive 4.7GB DVD. Running off copies was cheap and painless. I understand that high-def discs are some 25GB. Are you guys with your new Mac and Final Cut Pro working with HD buying these expensive discs for large volume runs? Are even decent bread-and-butter wedding shoots or corporate training films these days getting burned to BluRays?
3) Does it make sense to trade in a perfectly good 90's high-end standard definition digital cam for a new HD cam when I'm still going to burn it to a conventional DVD?
4) Is my gear still perfectly acceptable for budget projects? I really don't want to pay for Final Cut Pro and a HD burner ... I would only get one if my old editor is flat-out obsolete, which it certainly isn't for editing home movies.
Note: "Budget" does not mean poorhouse. I'm talking about "working" niche videos … competent (non-broadcast) megachurch sermon DVDs … homemade documentaries … non-Rolls-Royce weddings … small business promo videos ...
… the stuff that working joe videos are made of.
What constitutes "reasonable and acceptable" these days, when just about everybody has a high-def TV set they're watching these things on?

When I made the move from SD it was painful. It was just before the digital broadcast change over and when I hooked up my new Samsung 37" HD TV to my cable box I almost hurled.
since then, almost all of the broadcasters have caught up with HD transmission and almost all broadcast stuff in 1080i or 720p look amazing.
Standard Def DVDs are another story. Well done commercial SD DVDs can look quite nice when playing back through my new Samsung Blu-ray player. The folks who compress down to SD for the big studios are indeed rocket scientists and they're doing things that most of us simply can't afford to do.
Plus, the scaling technology in players and TVs has come a long way as well. So Don't throw out your standard DVDs just yet.
Should you consider a Hi Def camera? I'd say Yes, The time has come. If all you were doing was posting 480P online I'd say use your camera til it croaks. but the optical delivery is a factor for you.
Authoring your own BD for mass duplication? That's a little more complicated still. There are licensing issues involved in Blu-ray authoring which are complex. It's one of the reasons that we probably won't see Blu-ray hardware in Macs for a while. I don't think you can duplicate as easily as you can with DVD. You can burn your own one at a time if that's a possibility for you.
Shooting HD and delivering SD DVDs? It can be done. But compressing so that you end up with a satisfactory product is sort of a black art. You'll see lot's of discussions online about how many people are disappointed with HD to DVD, some claiming that their SD to DVD projects actually look better.
My latest technique for getting respectable DVDs is to first downrez in Mpeg Streamclip to an anamorphic SD file still in the Prores codec. Then I use Bitvice to do the mpeg2 file.
The bottom Line.
If you can afford it, get a new camera, BD burner and learn how to author BD. The authoring software is not fully baked yet for mac users but you should definitely head in that direction ASAP. You can even incorporate SD footage in an HD timeline and the SD footage is much more palatable than SD DVD.
On the up-side, you might be happy to know that you missed the worst of it. Be thankful that you were able to put it off so long. There are many other people out there who rode the bleeding edge and suffered a great deal of economic and emotional trauma.
good Luck!
g

Photoshop Elements 11 Organizer: Full screen view of lower quality than with PSE 10 and before?!

Upgrading from PSE 10 to 11, I noticed that when I watch my images with the organizer in PSE 11 in full screen view mode (F11), while the images load faster, they are shown in a lower quality than in PSE 10 or any other version of PSE that I owned before. In PSE 11, after the initial viewing in full screen (in the "fit screen" mode), when I click with the mouse on an image to display the "100%" view, there is a delay and the program says "Loading...", after which the 100% view in the full screen mode appears. When I then click another time with the mouse on the image to get back to "fit screen" mode, I get an image of better quality than during the initial view!
So it seems like the program first gives a faster, but lower quality view of the image in full screen mode, and only after the user requests a 100% view, it actually loads the image with full detail, which is then preserved when going back to the "fit screen" view. This is a serious issue for me, because I also use PSE organizer to present my pictures to other people, and I don't want to show them some lower quality versions of my images, but the full quality ones, without having to first choose "100% view" and then go back to "fit screen".
How can I make the PSE 11 organizer give me a full-quality full screen image right away, as this used to be the case in PSE10 and before?
(I have both versions, PSE 11 and PSE 10, now on the same computer and tested this to confirm that the PSE 11 initial full screen view is of lower quality than the PSE 10 one. Also in PSE 10, there is practically no delay for displaying the "100%" view afterwards, indicating that the image was loaded with full detail right away.)

- Update:
* Adobe's senior support level has replied to me about this issue as follows:
"Thank you for contacting Adobe.
When you press the F11 button, Organizer 11 uses the Bicubic
interpolation mainly because it is less processor intensive compared to
Bicubic Sharper, and it helps to create the preview on the fly, rather
than based on the thumbnail cache.
When you zoom out from the 100% view, Elements Organizer uses Bicubic
Sharper. This is because Bicubic Sharper is used for image reduction, so
if the 100% view is larger than the available screen space, it will need
to shrink. The Bicubic Sharper images may look more crisp however, Like
any sharpening algorithm, Bicubic Sharper introduces halos and
edge-enhancement artifacts. Those halos are typically slight, but any
further sharpening (which you'll need when preparing an image for print,
for example) will exaggerate them.This is expected behavior. The
Organizer isn't great for determining exact quality, I recommend you to
use Elements Editor for this purpose.
Thank you,
Bobby Johnson,
Adobe Technical Support."
* My reply on this to Adobe is:
"Hello Bobby,
thank you for your reply. Now at least we are talking about the same thing.
Why I am wondering about the choice to use the "Bicubic" algorithm when pressing F11 in PSE 11 is that all previous versions of PSE that I owned (which spans from PSE 6 to PSE 10) did use the "Bicubic Sharper" algorithm right away when pressing F11. So apparently Adobe didn't worry about processor intensity of this algorithm then, and computers are getting all the time more powerful.
It is true that in some situations, the "Bicubic Sharper" algorithm may introduce halos and edge-enhancement artifacts, as you write. On the other hand, especially on smaller resolution screens, the results of the "Bicubic Sharper" algorithm may look more crisp and lively, while the ones of the "Bicubic" algorithm may look more flat and lack fine detail. This is not only my personal opinion, but as I have brought up this topic in several forums, I can see that I am not alone here.
So assuming that the question about preferring "Bicubic Sharper" or "Bicubic" as a default algorithm when pressing F11 is partly a matter of taste, and partly a matter of the hardware the user has available, why can Abobe not give the user an option to choose which one he/she would prefer? For instance, F11 gives full screen view with "Bicubic" applied, and CTRL+F11 with "Bicubic sharper"? Or make this an option in the preferences?
As I am using the PSE organizer also to present pictures to other people (and I know many people who use it that way too), I would like to show them my pictures as sharp and detail-rich as possible. Therefore, I would highly appreciate an option as described above to be implemented in the PSE 11 organizer via an update. It should be fairly easy from a programming point of view, since both algorithms are already contained in the program anyway."
* If you support this suggestion of mine as stated above, please also contact Adobe accordingly! The more support requests they get for this, the more likely it is that they will implement this update! You may mention my case number 0184046323 for reference.

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When I move high quality clips into my timeline in Final Cut Express HD, they look and export low quality. I have tried converting the clips and de-interlacing them, but they always look the same, What is the problem? Thanks so much.

When I move high quality clips into my timeline in Final Cut Express HD, they look and export low quality. I have tried converting the clips and de-interlacing them, but they always look the same, What is the problem? Thanks so much.

You should check that the Project settings match the clip settings before editing them to the Timeline.
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If, for example, you have a Project set to NTSC DV you can only end up in trouble if the clips are PAL 1920 x 1080i.
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How to Export a WMV file in High Quality but low MB?

How to Export a WMV file in High Quality but low MB?

I'm really afraid you are the only person who can answer that.
ANY compression is totally relative: what do you think is small? What do you define as high quality?
I can get a 5 minute wmv file at just under 100mb that I find acceptable for browser downloads. You might think that's too big. I don't.
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Why are so many movies available in high def for ipad, but not for imac?

ok. another question, why are so many itunes rentals and movies unavailable in high def for rent or buy on an imac? i have a 27 inch imac. and an ipad, and it's funny, it will let me rent a high def video on the ipad, but not on the imac. it's wierd, i don't get it, because there are movies i would rent or buy on my imac, that i'm not going to buy now because of this.

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Edit: Well, looking at the AppleTV site it looks like Lionsgate allows rentals also now, but there may be terms in the contract which say which movies can be bought/rented.
Message was edited by: Kevin Shain

Apple tv video quality vs hd tv and high def dvd's

ok...i know it supports 1080i, but does the video quality of video in itunes really look good compared against say a blu-ray disc, or hdtv signals? i'm sure it will get better (with a hardware or software upgrade?) if its not close to high def quality but want to know what i'm in store for if i buy appletv now...thanks. PS: i currently have directv HD and a ps3 for blu-ray, and my tv's are all HD...

Based on my own testing, the distinctions between an HD-DVD movie (which are true 1080) and an Apple TV video converted as its own maximum settings (which is 720) is actually quite noticeable if you have a 1080 TV set, but at the same I don't consider it a show-stopper. I watch a lot of HD broadcast content that's only 720p, and it's still very good.
An HD-DVD or Blu-Ray DVD will normally be in 1920 x 1080 resolution (1080p or 1080i, generally depending on your equipment). The Apple TV's maximum resolution is 1280 x 720 (basically 720p). Therefore, even an original HD-DVD or Blu-Ray DVD converted to Apple TV will need to be scaled down to 720p for display on the Apple TV.
Further, Elgato EyeTV actually scales these down somewhat lower, so HDTV recorded content could be even worse-off, depending on the original source. The standard Apple TV export settings use a 960 x 540 frame in order to keep the bit-rate and frame rate within tolerances (since a 720p signal is approximately 60fps, and the bitrates will generally exceed 5-6 mbps, which pushes the limits of the Apple TV).
Even more interestingly, Elgato's new turbo.264 dongle will only encode in "Apple TV" format at a maximum resolution of 800 x 600 (and if you do the math you will realize that this will be considerably less for a 16:9 aspect ratio video).
The result is that videos converted from an EyeTV Hybrid are technically much worse off on the Apple TV than viewing the original source material. Whether this is significant enough to be noticeable will depend on your output medium, but on my 62" DLP, the difference is quite apparent (although still far superior to an SDTV signal).
You can get 1280 x 720 content to play back at 60fps at 5mbps bit-rates on the Apple TV by using ffmpeg-based encoders and manually selecting higher settings, although it's been hit-and-miss in my own testing, and of course it creates gargantuan files. Elgato and others have obviously tried to stay with the more conservative settings to ensure that they can guarantee the broadcast possible range of support.
In fact, although most of the standard encoder settings max out at 2.5-3.0 mbps, I've successfully pushed up to 6 mbps through the Apple TV, although such content has to be synced rather than streamed, since even an 802.11n network has a hard time keeping up (it worked, but there were some drop-outs and glitches in the process). Of course, 6mbps content is going to fill up the Apple TV hard drive pretty quickly as well (you'd only be able to fit around 11 hours on the internal 40GB hard drive).
The other thing to keep in mind with DVD movies is that they come from film, which is a 24fps source (based on the physical nature of film). As a result, the distinctions between a 720p and 1080i signal are less prevalant when dealing with film content, since you won't get the full 60fps HDTV capabilities anyway. Interlacing can still create some nasty side-effects, but it's far less of an issue when you're dealing with less than half of the normal frames.
In my own experiences, I have an Apple TV that is connected to a 1080p upscaling DLP TV (native 1080i input, internalized de-interlacing), and a second Apple TV that is connected to a 720p LCD TV. With the first Apple TV, I can notice the difference between 720p and 1080i output settings only when viewing photos, since the remainder of the standard content doesn't exceed 720p anyway. Further, because my TV de-interlaces a 1080i signal to 1080p, I don't get the flicker that is normally associated with a 1080i signal.
On the second Apple TV, I leave the setting to 720p, since that's the native resolution of the second TV, and I get noticeable interlacing-based flickering on the 1080i, particularly with photo slideshows (mostly in the transitions).

How can I replace one low quality source with another high quality one ?

Am I really this dumb or is it really this hard ?
I have one timeline / project / edit that essentially references one long source clip / event / file.
I have a newer higher quality transcoded version of the same source and want to replace the original lower quality version and end up with the same edited result just with better quality images !?
It's the same frame rate and image dimensions but "relink" tells me the new file is not "similar" enough and won't do it !
Why is this so hard ? Is there a way to export a good old fashioned edl and then just reconform using the new source ?
What if I wanted to to replace low res offline footage with finished colour-corrected material and output a finished master - would that be this clueless as well ?
Please let me know the problem is between the chair and the keyboard - not between the hard disk and the power cord !

Guessing that when you created the higher quality media, it was done outside of FCP and probably changed some important metadata that the app is looking for. Or perhaps there is a difference between the original audio and the new audio.
Anyway, Luis' advice about the replace edit seems like the easiest solution.
a_mumford wrote:
What if I wanted to to replace low res offline footage with finished colour-corrected material and output a finished master - would that be this clueless as well?
The usual way to do offline online is within FCP – creating the proxies and then using Preferences to switch back to and from.
If you sent it out for grading, the Relink should work fine. If you haven't seen this kb doc, it's worth reviewing.
Russ

High def on my iMac, but low quality on MacBook :(

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