Poor quality video after imovie imports it

I have reasonably good quality video (Video DivX 6.0, 640x480, 29.97 fps, Audio: uLaw 2:1, Mono, 8000 Hz) ) which when viewed on my imac in QT looks good. I then import into imovieHD and the quality reduces (lower res and flatter contrast).
The problem seems to be the conversion to DV because if I use toast to do this same conversion I get the same loss in quality (I needed to do this to get movieds into imovie08)
So my question is, given that imovie seems to only use DV (converting all other formats), how to I convert my videos to DV without quality loss (I have all the usual 10.5 software and also TOAST)
Hope somone can help, been banging my head against this for a while now.

At it's heart, iMovie is a DV editing application. When you look at the big picture there are two fundamental video files: those that are meant to be edited and those that are meant to be distributed (youtube, DVD etc). You have a "distributed" file that you wish to edit. This simply means there will always be obstacles and loss of quality. As example, a DV file = 13GB/hour. This is compressed for distribution (commonly using iDVD to create a DVD which only holds 4.3GB). The more compressed the file is, the more quality is going to suffer.
Your file is very compressed and I think you are barking up the wrong tree. What is it you want to do with your file inside of iMovie? I believe there are Divx editing applications out there that will perform simply cuts- but I think they are Windows only. I didn't see anything that would do more than simple cuts, probably because all the individual frame information is gone via compression (which is why iMovie wants an individual frame format).
I may have an MP3 a friend gives me of a orchestra performance. The original recording took place in a studio, mastered via a huge 48-track console. I may want to go back and extract just the trumpet- easy enough with the source material- but not something that can be realistically done with a very compressed MP3.
Mike

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I have been trying to burn a 1hr 27min .avi file (700MB) for 4 days now. Ive tried a few ways but each time the DVD has poorer quality video than the original file.
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- opening in QT Pro and then 'stream as DV'. which i opened in iDVD and saved as disc image with menus etc. burnt using toast titanium - probably the best result so far i think)
however the dv file was worse than an mp4 file i created using iSquint from the .avi.
- have also tried just opening the avi in toast and burning from there. worse product than the previous one.
So, any suggestions? The main problem is things look quite jagged and a bit pixelated if you know what i mean. Where as the mp4 file, which ive played using iTunes and VLC, is quite smooth (but you can see there's still a bit of quality loss when sharp movements are made by the actors.(expected).
So I've lost lots of time on this stupid thing, but I just really want to sort out how to do it well once and for all.
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G'day Looneysbin
Sounds like a hardware problem. Is your drive under warranty?
For a start, try rendering your iDVD project to a disk image, instead of burning straight to disk.
Then, create a new Burn Folder on your desktop, and drag the VIDEO.TS file from the opened disk image to the burn folder (note that only an alias actually gets put in the folder).
Next, use Control-click on the Burn Folder to get the contextual menu, and select 'Burn Disc'. Follow the prompts, but burn at the minimum speed available.
This way, your apparent hardware problem won't mean re-rendering the iDVD file each time you try and burn a disc.
You can also keep the .img file on your hard drive as a backup of the disc.
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Regards
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Eswar M wrote:
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Message was edited by: kiwikiwi

Thank you so much! Although it's not exporting quite as clear as before, it's much, MUCH better now that I've corrected the timeline dominance - I'd say 95% better; and it will be re-compressed by my clients for web streaming so it doesn't need to be perfect - but the initial quality was garbage.
I suspect when I exported my T2i footage as a ProRes file, than imported into After Effects, then back into FCP something happened along the way that messed up the quality slightly. Although the only difference in my method between FCP5 and 7 was converting to ProRes; which I only did for editing purposes as the native T2i footage needs to be rendered... which ended up being redundant as all my After Effects work needed to be rendered anyway. Ho hum.
Do you think the ProRes conversion could account for the quality loss? It wasn't just the footage that was grainy/fuzzy, it was also the After Effects graphic work, which is why I didn't think the converstion could be the culprit. Hm. I'll have to look into this more!
Thanks again - and so sorry for my delayed reply, I went on vacation shortly after I posted that message and only just got back to this project now
Message was edited by: kiwikiwi

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they have to ...
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Poor quality video after imovie imports it

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