IMovie to iDVD quality drop

Hi. I've read a number of threads about this and just thought to share my experience, and ask if anyone had any bright ideas to improve things.
My footage is of an outdoor concert, shot pretty well on Sony DVCAM with an audio feed from the desk. The 4 hours of footage imported like a dream into iMovie HD. I stripped off the sound track, made some EQ and dynamics improvements and layed it back - perfectly in sync - a miracle!
So I have a finished item, easily produced, looks and sounds great, but using over 50Gb of disk space. So I split it in two and burn best quality to iDVD. I make a further edit of 50 mins. and burn that as a separate iDVD project. To my surprise the conversions, chapter markers, animations etc all work flawlessly.
The problem is end quality on DVD. The picture is terribly pixelated (especially over any transitions e.g. dissolves) and the audio is wrecked. The drums pump as though compressed with everything on 11.
Okay - the file size (for the 50 min cut) has gone from 17Gb in iMovie to 3.5Gb in iDVD and that represents a load of lost (or heavily compressed) information, but the end result is a real dissapointment on disk.
So for now I have 'shared' (terrible term) from iMovie back to regular DV tape until such times as better disk conversions or maybe Bluray provide a solution.
In these forums, many respondants have asked 'what do you expect from a low-cost application?' - which sounds fair - except that it seems to me that this final step in the production chain is a really surprisingly weak link.
iMovie is terrific, the iDVD interface is brilliant - things that we expect Apple to do well, and they do - but all this is wasted if customers are habitually disappointed by the end result, and from reading these forums, they are.
G5 2x2GHz 2HD   Mac OS X (10.4.7)  

Using my e-mac 1.25 / panther / imovie 5,the results I get from DVD's burned on this machine are excellent,not only I, but others remark on how sharp and clear the end product is.Generally speaking ,I was so pleased with the e-mac
that after a year passed continually feeding in six hours of DV and burning
three DVD's of just under two hours most weekends,I purchased an imac 2.g / 20" / tiger / ilife 6. thinking it will be a faster ,and better (a year is a long time in computer hardware and software)machine .
Well ! ....
how wrong could I be ! in addition to the heavy pixillating/blocking on the finished DVD's I had to contend with constant freezing ,crashing and sudden quitting of applications for no apparent reason.Lots of wasted time and effort
not to mention coasters ( things that just did not happen with the e-mac )
It got so that every time I used the i-mac I crossed my fingers !
Eventually,I Started from scratch and restored with panther and ilife5 and
generally speaking it's a far better machine to work with, certainly the pixilating/blocking has gone and the results are ok ,I can at least use the i-mac with some confidence,,perhaps I was just unlucky with ilife 6 but it won't be installed again !
So Iain, I don't know if you want to go down that road,it is only a suggestion
but for this machine, it worked ! ( fingers crossed ! )
Good luck

Similar Messages

  • IMovie to iDVD quality

    Hi,
    I've read many posts on the issue of quality, most though don't seem to be quite like mine. The problem it seems for many is that it's difficult to describe exactly how bad the quality is. I'll do my best in this regard...
    Basically, I have a quicktime movie file (ends with .mov, that's all I know) which I made with a little program called Image Surfer. If I play this movie file in Quicktime, the quality is excellent, clear as a bell. I have my computer hooked up to my TV, and on the TV the quality is excellent.
    Now, I import the file into iMovie 6. As I understand it the preview that shows in the iMovie window is just that, a preview. So the quality is pretty bad, pixelated, choppy, ugly. However, titles for example still look very smooth and crisp.
    So I finish editing my movie and hit 'share' and choose iDVD.
    My movie then pops up in an iDVD window (with no processing) and I do a few menues and make it beautiful. Now, if I play the movie within iDVD it still looks like the preview in iMovie, ugly. I figure that's how it should be?
    I then hit burn, it chugs away and 5 hours later a DVD spits out. Now, I'm confident all the formats are the same (PAL, 4:3) in all programs. In iDVD, I have best quality selected. The movie is only about 20 minutes long, so it shouldn't need to compress it to fit.
    But alas, the DVD looks ugly. It looks exactly the same as the previews in iMovie, pixelated, choppy, ugly. Both on my computer screen, and my TV, and played on several DVD players. The titles are pixelated and ugly. It's all ugly.
    Now I might just have assumed that this is as good as it gets, but then I put on a DVD which I made a couple of years back using the exact same method only with earlier versions of iMovie and iDVD, and guess what... it's crystal clear.
    What happended? What has changed? What am I doing wrong? Is there a secret setting I've missed?
    Surely the quality of video hasn't DEcreased with each version of iLife.
    Thanks for any advice, the trial & error with a problem like this has proved quite time consuming.

    Never mind, I'm an idoit. Well maybe just a little absent minded.
    In the midst of my experimentation I glanced up to the top bar of my iMovie project and spotted a curious little line "MPEG-4".
    It would seem on the creation of my project I have neglected to select the DV-PAL format, hence all my video was being re-encoded.
    Giving myself an uppercut as we speak.
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    Shippey thanks for that link, I'll check it out. I had noticed some time back that Image Surfer was being discontinued, didn't realise it morphed into PTM. I'll have to give it a go.

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    When I try to burn a movie I made from iMovie through iDVD the quality of the picture is significantly low. How can I get this fixed? I want to have crisp movies on my DVDS??

    Mike you are what I'd call trigger happy. People really need to stop doing that and just get on with helping people or discussing the topic at hand. If you haven't got anything worthwhile to say then don't say anything at all.
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    Was it a mistake to render this then?
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    Hi mac people,
    I using mavericks's imovie, 10.0.5,
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    MB Pro 1,83 GHz 1,5GB Ram 120HD   Mac OS X (10.4.7)   20" Cin-displ; Lacie 120-500-600 Extern HD

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