Poor quality when importing from sony dcr-sr58

Dear All
I've got a sony dcr-sr58e video camera, and for ages the quality has been poor, once i've, a) imported the footage from the camera into imovie then b) from there to idvd then c) watching it back on a tv
I thought it was just me being fussy, but friends and colleagues have noticed that its quality is comparable with an old vhs video camera!
I put all the settings to the max (high quality etc....)on the camera but to no effect, and have checked the settings on imovie
The sony support have stated that its probably a problem with imovie (which it doesn't seem to be)
Fot the record i'm running OSX 10.6.8  with imovie version 9.0.4
If anyone else has had a similar problem and solve dit i'd be very grateful to hear
Thanks
Kelly

Hello kellyfromkenley, Depending on how you move the video or share the video from iMovie to iDVD it can make a big difference. One way is to go to the Share Menu > Share to iDVD. But the better is to Share to Media Browser instead. Try this:
Go back to iMovie and open your Project in Project Library.
Go to Share Menu > Share to Media Browser
Choose the Large size and let it run until it finishes
Quit iMovie and open iDVD.
In iDVD click on the Media Button, then click on the Movies button and look for your project under the iMovie star icon in the Media Browser itself.
Drag that project icon into the iDVD project window and burn another disk
I think you'll see an increase in the visual quality using this method.
The reason this has an effect on the visual quality is there's a whole different set of operations performed on the video when you first Share to Media Browser. The side effect of those changes in steps is a much better looking DVD from your iMovie project.

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