IMovie and DVD Quality

Question

Hello,
I tried to burn a dvd (iDVD) with 3 short movies (2 min).
- 1 movie imported (as Large) from a Canon HG10 Camcorder (AVCHD) and exported to the media browser (as Large) for iDVD.
- 1 Movie imported from an old Sony minidv camcorder (SD) and directly used in iDVD (.dv file).
- 1 Movie from the same Sony camcorder and exported to the media browser (as Large) for iDVD.
My problem is that once played from the DVD, the quality of the first movie is very poor (not smooth, picture quality, ...). In fact the second one (from SD .dv file) look far better (and actually very good).
How can it be ? I know that you cannot burn HD content on standard video DVD without converting it to SD, but how can the resulting quality be so poor, not even approaching standard quality of an old SD camcorder ? I'm also aware that i didn't import my movie from the camcorder at full quality (1920/1080) but 960/540 should be enough for home DVD quality.
Remarks :
I tried to burn the first movie from the original (and very large) .mov file instead of the media browser file but same problem.
The quality of the third movie was also very poor.
Am I missing something ?

Answer 1

This is very interesting Aaron ... Thank you for the link. I will try this out.
I have a HDD camcorder (MPEG-2) and have been experimenting with different workflows in the past few days, and here is what I found:
*A) Camcorder (MPEG-2) --> iMovie08 --> Media Browser --> iDVD*
Picture is blurried, colors look washed out. Not much, but catches someones eye (ie. my family)
*B) Camcorder (MPEG-2) --> MPEG Streamclip (convert to DV) --> iMovie HD6 --> iDVD (direct export from previous).*
This worked good, and the quality is very close to original, played on TV directly from the camcorder. The only thing I did not like is lengthy process of converting to DV + importing to iMovie HD6. One note here ... When converting to DV in Streamclip, "deinterlacing" setting should be checked! Otherwise, the edges become jagged.
*C) Same workflow as 'A', but prior to importing clips into iMovie08, I changed the quality setting in QuickTime preferences to "Use high quality video setting when available".*
Now, quality wise, 'C' = 'B'! There has been a lot of discussions on this topic, for iMovie08+DV content, but it seems that works with MPEG-2 as well. Perhaps (I'm far from expert) iMovie08, during conversion process (ie. for media browser, or internally) uses some of the QuickTime help, regardless of whch export (share) option is selected. I also noticed a difference in processing time (longer), when preparing the project for media browser. I may be mistaken about my speculations, but difference in quality is very pronounced.
Message was edited by: Milan 011
Message was edited by: Milan 011