Loss of quality from iMovie Project to Burned DVD

Question

Hello,
I have read some strings regarding this subject but I'm still left with questions.
I have created a photo collage set to music, in iMovie. It's 12 minutes long, and when I play it in iMovie on my computer, it looks great. All the photos are crystal clear, rich with color, and vibrant in all the right places.
I played the file in Quicktime 10.0 and it looks great.
The info in the Quicktime Inspector is
Format: H.264, 1920x1080, Millions AAC, 2 Channels, 44100 Hz
FPS: 29.97
Data Rate: 20.23 Mbit/s
Current Size: 1549x871
I burned this to a DVD using Toast Titanium (because ever since my iLife '11 upgrade my iDVD hasn't worked past startup. I can't get it to do anything at all.)
Somewhere between the Quicktime movie and the Burned DVD, the movie loses a significant amount of quality. It seems all the colors are washed out. I can see my edits on some of the photos... it looks like crap. To me it looks awful, to others it may not look as bad, but I know the difference. It looks awful.
Can someone please tell me why this is happening and how I can prevent it? All while still using iMovie through this whole process, and Toast for burning?
Thank you so much
YahYah

Answer 1

Hi Ziatron,
The quality workaround I proposed assumes the person starts with a progressive source material. The original poster did as I don't see how you would import true progressive source media and get interlaced artifacts at the end, especially for stills! We are not in the days of the Sony Mavica you know. What you are doing is importing interlaced video and processing it in interlace with a progressive scan workflow. The combing artifacts you saw is from the consumer algorithm that is inherent in iMovie 11. I know iMovie 6HD and FCE or FCP have better de-interlacing algorithms. You can by pass iMovie 11's weakness by treating the interlaced video through a commercial/high end de-interlace software and get better results.
As long as you are working with a progressive source media, then you are not bound by de-interlacing artifacts unless your movie was shot in it. Suffice to say, best de-interlace programs cost money and a lot of computing power. That is not something the majority of computer owners use iMovie possess. I see you have a high end Mac Pro. I also have a high end Quad PC with a high end Nvidia graphics card to utilize its hundreds of CUDA cores for vReveal to eat on. But that's not what the general public of Mac or PC owners have nor what the general public buy during Black Friday or Boxing Day in Canada either. High end Macs or high end Quad PCs go with high end video editing software where the de-interlacing and the encoding and decoding algorithms are much better than the consumer versions.
This is OBVIOUS! Better algorithms will simply slow down any mid-end Macs to mid-end PCs to a low teeny 1-5 fps processing a video clip in H.264 in very very high quality and multiple passes. This is not acceptable to the general public. Which is why, you are also seeing noise artifacts in the workflow too, because you need to first de-interlace the source media and then re-encode to H.264 which obviously adds artifacts to the source before you can use it with iMovie 11, so clearly iMovie 6HD has a clear advantage. This carries over to the final workflow. But most AVCHD material out there is compressed too!
Consumers need to be aware that there is a difference between consumer grade software and commercial grade software. Also, commercial grade software require a hefty computer to do its job reasonably well! People need to understand that just because you own a nice $900 to $1000 camcorder does not mean that your mid-end Mac can deal with it.
Getting quality is so easy. Just spend lots and lots of money on hardware to shave off 15mins to a few hours of video encoding to digital video processing, but at what end because it will never end!
I've seen a few footages floating around on Youtube that looks really good made with iMovie 11. Just keep in mind that there are always tradeoffs for reasonable rendering time vs cost of your computer package.
Message was edited by: Coolmax