Motion playback window MUCH better quality than final output?

I'm puzzled. I export a straight DV NTSC. The Motion playback window pops up when the job is done. It plays back the finished clip and it looks just grand, very clean. I open the clip itself in the Quicktime Player and it is quite ugly, full of artifacting and waffling.
Can someone explain to me the difference between the Motion playback window (the one that pops up when a job has been exported) and the Quicktime Player (such that one looks great and the other looks horrible)?
B.

Cher Mark,
****. Isn't life curious. And my brain even more curioser (to me). I've got credits on hundreds of films, I've produced at least twenty films myself in the last five years, I've edited half of them myself ... and I never ever knew there was that option on the Quicktime Player. Duh. Maybe it has something to do with working in SD again ... back in prehistoric times when everybody was working in SD there was always a good external monitor; and when we switched to HD the difference in QT Player quality was less noticeable, actually, I just looked, not noticeable on my laptop.
Thank you thank you, again, Mark ... the light goes on ... now I'm going to race off and find, I bet it exists, a draft\best mode for the FCP canvas window: We've been using the canvas window - dragged and resized on a second HD monitor to get a full frame 4:3 to cut this IMAX film. I'm trying to convince the boys to switch over to Apple (it's mainly a PC pipeline right now): so they have a modest tower (no frills), and are cutting in SD. They are being converted by degrees.
Very much appreciated...
Ben

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I'm slowly building my home media server and putting my Blu-Ray's onto it. I normally do a Handbrake conversion for ATV3, so the MKV files end up being significantly smaller m4v's and the quality is outstanding. But I recently learned about the quick remux method using Subler, which quickly converts the MKV container into an m4v container without any quality loss and while keeping the same size file. But I noticed that, say, a 29GB MKV file is a much poorer softer picture on my plasma TV than the same movie that's only a 9GB MKV file (remuxed to m4v with subler for streaming over ATV3). I'm running a 300mbps cable modem so the streaming shouldn't be a problem over my home wifi. But I also noticed that the smaller m4v's (say a 3.5GB file that comes from a 9GB MKV file via Handbrake) seem to be slightly better quality than the 9GB file that was remuxed. So it seems like the larger file should be even higher quality -- but I'm getting better results with a smaller file that's Handbrake'd from MKV to m4v.
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I have no experience of the remuxing you describe, but interesting observations.
There is nothing you can adjust on AppleTV - it will either play the encoded movie or it won't.
AppleTv's generally playback the h264 codec (in an m4v container) - there are many many versions/levels of this codec and each generation of AppleTv has been able to play slightly more sophisticated versions.
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Just switched to BOOST MOBILE..MUCH MUCH MUCH better than Verizon!

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Motion playback on production monitor through AJA Kona LH card looks nasty.

Okay, so here's the deal.
We have recently invested in some shiny new things to equip an edit suite - a Kona LH card and a Production Monitor. Along with a Sony HDV/DVCAM VTR. Specs of our set up are listed at the bottom.
Pretty much all of the work we have done in the past has been non-braodcast - we're looking to improve workflow and quality of final output. We work mainly with Final Cut Pro, but also with Motion.
We have connected everything and have marvelled at how much of a difference it makes having a proper video preview from Final Cut (v. 6) as opposed to what we had before - firewire to camera to TV... Of course we were expecting this marked improvement.
We were also expecting the key benefit of a video preview output from Motion.
Now. We do get a video output through to the production monitor from Motion. But this is where it gets weird.
When we do a preview of an animation, it looks really shoddy.
As a test case, let's take a basic text crawl in Motion 3.
Static graphics look great, but when you play motion graphics, the image quality is really jaggy and nasty. (even at full frame RAM preview, best render settings, full res - all of these options are apparently properly selected).
So we did some test exports. Usually we would export animations in the Animation Codec, with an alpha if intended for compositing on top of a video track in FCP... we tried a bunch of different formats - animation, photoJpeg, DVCPRO 50, Aja 2Vuy, Uncompressed 10bit...
All these play from Quicktime on the computer monitor just fine, but when playing from the AJA TV app to the production monitor, again the same problem. And then when you bring them into Final Cut, the same problem, even when you match the sequence settings and field order to the source video ...
In effect, it seems that anything generated in Motion just doesn't want to look nice on our Production Monitor - even when imported into FCP.
HOWEVER - if you drop the Motion PROJECT into an FCP timeline, all is fine!
We know the AJA card and the Monitor are working because of this fact, and because when you generate titles from within FCP itself - the same text scroll, for instance, it looks perfect!
I have also found when working with old composited animations originating from AE that you can get FCP to pump these through to the production monitor beautifully when working in an uncompressed sequence setting - or in an Animation sequence setting. (For an Animation sequence to go the the production monitor from FCP, the Video Playback option in A/V Settings needs to be set to "AJA Kona 625i25 RGBA" instead of "AJA Kona 625i25 8 bit" or 10 bit).
The above point could be of relevance...? The only Video Output options from Motion or AE that apply to our setup and monitor are "625i25 RGBA" and "625i25 DV-RGBA" ... are we supposed to have more options?
In short, we could work around these issues - it just doesn't seem right however that we can't get a decent external preview from Motion. A big reason for upgrading our setup was faithful video previews of animations from these programs...
We also can't understand why exports from these animation programs can look so poor. I can export a video with a text crawl generated from a DV PAL Final Cut Project with DV Pal compression settings and it looks massively better playing through AJA TV than our test Motion exports.
It just isn't right.
Please help. Pretty please.
For reference, here are the specs of our set up:
Apple Dual 2.5 GHz PowerPC G5
4.5 GB DDR SDRAM
Graphics Card: ATI Radeon 9800 XT
Equipped with Kona LH Card
JVC TM-H1750CG Production Monitor fed via SDI (have also tried component, to no avail)
It just isn't right.
Please help. Pretty please. Many thanks in advance.
For reference, here are the specs of our set up:
Apple Dual 2.5 GHz PowerPC G5
4.5 GB DDR SDRAM
Graphics Card: ATI Radeon 9800 XT
Equipped with Kona LH Card (version 5)
2 x 23" Apple Cinema Displays
JVC TM-H1750CG Production Monitor fed via SDI (have also tried component, to no avail)

Sounds like you are seeing interlace artifacts - in Motion's project properties, have you tried setting the field dominance to None?

Why does the Fireworks save for web function give better results than in Photoshop?

Having used the trial version of Fireworks, I have noticed that the save for web function gives greater compression and image quality than saving for web in Photoshop. Why is this?
As Adobe are not continuing in developing Fireworks, does anyone know if will they will improve the save for web function in Photoshop to match the Fireworks version?
Are there any third party companies who anyone can recommend who will process large volumes of images for web?
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One of my favourite topics ;-P
First, the save for web function in Photoshop has not seen any real updates in a long time. In Fireworks PNG export allows for fully transparent optimized files with indexed 256 or less colours, which is impossible in the save for web function in Photohop. It is unsupported.
This is one of the reasons why Fireworks does a much better job than Photoshop. Another reason is that Photoshop adds meta junk in its exported files, and this also increases the file size (and should be removed, because there are also a number of fields which include information about your setup).
One other caveat is that Photoshop's save for web functions neither allows for a choice in chroma subsampling, and instead decides automatically below a certain quality threshold to degrade the colour sharpness quality. The user has no control over this. (Fireworks also limits the user this way.)
One thing to be careful of: FW's jpg quality setting, and PS's quality settings are very different - a 50 in Photoshop is not the same 50 setting in Fireworks.
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(When you install, be careful NOT to install the extra junkware!)
Fireworks cannot change the chroma subsampling to 4:2:0, which does degrade the quality a bit compared to RIOT and Photoshop in my experience. Photoshop adds useless meta information, even if the user tells it not to do that. RIOT allows you to remove that information, saving 6k. RIOT also offers an automatic mode that optimizes existing jpg images without degrading the quality further, and often saves 10k or more, depending on the images.
Interestingly enough, in my tests exported Fireworks jpg images are always reduced in file size by RIOT, due to FW's jpg export limitations, without any image degradation.
In my tests FW's jpg quality versus file size turns out to be the worst of all three. RIOT generally wins, or is at least on par with Photoshop.
As for PNG export, Photoshop's save for web function is quite abysmal. No 256 colour full transparency export is possible, while Fireworks does support this.
Having said that, there is a free alternative that leaves both Photoshop AND Fireworks in the dust: Color Quantizer. http://x128.ho.ua/color-quantizer.html
CQ is an amazing little tool: with it anyone can create PNG files with full transparency and reduced to ANY number of colours! It means that a 512 colour PNG with full transparency is now very easy to do. On top of that, for more difficult images a simple quality mask brush tool allows the user to control and retain even small colour details in a PNG, while reducing the file size to an absolute minimum.
CQ is one of the best kept secrets of a Web Developer's toolkit. And it is free!
Both RIOT and Color Quantizer have a built-in batch mode. Both are available for WIndows. Not for Mac. If you are on a Mac, try imageOptim. Not nearly as good as RIOT and CQ, but quite passable.
PS to be fair, the newest versions of Photoshop do allow for export of 8bit PNGs with full transparency through the use of its Generator functionality. But again, it cannot compete with CQ. And as far as I am aware, Generator cannot be used in Photoshop's batch processing (which, btw, is very slow! For simpler daily image processing tasks I have to do in batches, I prefer IrfanView, which is lightning fast! IrfanView).

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I just recently got a job editing videos for my school and I'm using Final Cut Pro. Of course all the videos I've made for work are in .mov formats. But recently my boss asked me to convert the file to a .wmv format for him, for what reason I have no idea.
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Motion playback window MUCH better quality than final output?

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