Huge quality loss in iMove '11

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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    (e) AVCHD camcorders - unless you're looking at 'semi-pro' or professional 'cost-a-plenty' record-to-chip camcorders, or that Sony HD12..
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    ..HDV can be returned back to tape, whereas it's more long-winded and needs more subterfuge to export AVCHD back to a chip, or a camcorder's hard disc, for in-camera replay ..and thence out to an HDTV.
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    I also love the idea of putting a duplicate clip under the original - kinda "artsy" and that might even be asthetically pleasing. But remember that I'm going the other way from 16:9 to 4:3. Maybe if I take the few 16:9 clips and duplicate them at 133% placing them under the original 16:9 footage it would achieve the same look as your idea for the 4:3 footage.......   I'll see if it works. I like your ideas! You think "outside the video box".

  • Doubts about quality loss from analog to DV.

    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....-

  • HDV or AVCHD editing =   processor utilization = import/exp. quality loss

    Hello,
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    Thanks for your replies to my several questions!

    I have cut/pasted this from another thread where I posted it following a question from a Canon HV20 owner. The info applies to all HDV and AVCHD cams though. Might help you decide.
    This comes from www.camcorderinfo.com
    Compression (7.0)
    The Canon HV20 (Review, Specs, Recent News, $903) uses HDV compression, a very efficient MPEG-2 codec with a fixed data rate of 25Mbps, identical to the data rate of standard definition DV compression. HDV excels in capturing stunningly high-resolution video, but it is inferior to DV in terms of rendering motion realistically, due to its dependence on interframe compression. This means that at 1080i, only one in fifteen frames is a full-frame picture, while the intervening frames are compressed in relation to each full I frame. Interframe compression is much more efficient than intraframe compression, and allows HDV to squeeze a full 1920 x 1080 picture into a 25Mbps stream, recordable to inexpensive MiniDV tapes. DV uses intraframe compression, so each frame is a fully independent picture, allowing much better motion capture. DV also uses a superior 4:1:1 color space while HDV encodes via a truncated 4:2:0 color space.
    The inherent weaknesses of HDV have led many networks to deem the format sub-standard for broadcast, but it is still the best high definition format available on the consumer camcorder market. Most consumers find the stunning resolution of HDV trumps the superior motion handling of DV. A professionally lit HDV interview (or any HDV shot without too much detail or motion) can look nearly as good as footage shot in a professional HD format on a $20,000 camera. AVCHD, a new HD format that uses H.264 compression was introduced in 2006 and compresses video even more aggressively than HDV. Our tests of Canon's UX1 (Review, Specs, Recent News, $729.95) and SR1 (Review, Specs, Recent News, $1119.99) last fall show that while AVCHD video is very sharp, it suffers from grain and artifacts much more than HDV compression. The wildcard in the consumer high definition arena is a new MPEG-2 format developed by JVC, the MPEG Transfer Stream codec, which appears for the first time in the Everio HD7 (Review, Specs, Recent News, $1529). MPEG Transport Stream compresses video at up to 30Mbps, and may rival or even outclass HDV compression.
    Media (6.0)
    Like other HDV camcorders, the Canon HV20 records to MiniDV cassettes, the same inexpensive and widely available format used by standard definition DV camcorders. MiniDV cassettes have a run time of 60 minutes in SP mode, but can hold up to 90 minutes of more compressed LP video. Unlike the DVD, memory card, and HDD formats, MiniDV tapes are linear media so moving clips to a PC from tape is a real-time process. For anyone serious about the quality of his or her video, HDV recorded to MiniDV cassette remains the best consumer HD option available. To date, consumer non-linear video formats do not support the highest-quality video compression codices for high definition (HDV) and standard definition (DV).

  • Did Apple fix the video quality issue in iMovie '09?

    I am a casual video editor and iMovie 08 had the perfect user experience / functionality for what I want to do.
    However, the known video quality issue (throwing away interlaced scan lines) made the result unacceptable since I archive our family video on DVDs. I have been forced to use iMovie HD for that reason. I have tried tricks such as converting the original DV files to AIF and deinterlace prior to import into iMovie08 but that did not seem to work either.
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    MESSAGE TO APPLE IF YOU ARE LISTENING:
    Please fix the video quality in iMovie09 if not already. Yes, the quality is ok for YouTube or Internet video but for those of us who want simple editing to archive our family video we cannot accept poor video quality. Dropping an interlace field effectively halves the vertical resolution. Thank you.

    Please explain this in more detail when you say Adaptive Deinterlacer. Are you talking about another program? If so, what program and what are the specific steps.
    Also, sounds like you are recommending imovie09. By saying to do the above, are you saying imovie09 still causes you too loose significant quality like imovie08? Are you saying you can use imovie08 or imovie09 with these steps to get high quality video or just imovie09? I guess I just need more specifics on how you do what you are describing and how imovie09 fits into this versus imovie08. I joined this whole discussion trying to figure out if upgrading imovie09 made a difference regarding the whole quality issue. I know it has more features, but I am more concerned about he quality of the video right now. Thanks.

  • Significant quality loss and jagged diagonal lines when exporting from FCP

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    Captured from 24A progressive, Sony HVR V1U HDV.
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    Welcome to the forums!
    Unfortunately, you seem to have tried everything I can think of, and I don't have the latest versions of FCP to know if it is a bug. However, in the off chance that you haven't given this a shot:
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    Look at that in Quicktime and see if it's bad. If it's not problematic, use that video file in Compressor for your render.
    Hope that helps!
    ~Luke

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