Re: Sudden loss of project image quality in iMovie 11

Hi
I'm an anxious technophobe looking for answers...
The image quality of my iMovie project suddenly went from crisp, to blurry and made the black areas in the film grey and pixilated/blocky (or is it considered 'noise'?). It had been perfectly fine before. The footage was shot on a 2011 Sony Handicam and I'm using a 2011 MacBook Pro. I had recently installed updates, including one that supposed fixed out of synch sound problems. I had a loss of quality with another project and optimised it to "original size" (It took hours and made absolutely no difference BTW). I should also mention my hard drive has limited space at the moment and iMovie is running very slowly.
Any suggestions/ diagnosis???
I am anxious to restore the previous sharp quality I had just hours ago.
Thanks

It sounds like the hard disk space could be the culprit.
I would recommend you get an external drive. You need to move some of your events to the external drive to free up space. This must be done within iMovie. Let us know if you need help with this. (or search the discussions for how to move events)

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Image quality in iMovie

Hi guys,
I am trying to use iMovie to put together a slide show (I am a wildlife photographer) and it seems great for the job
There are a couple of bugs within iMovie itself but mostly no big deal, except for one that is bugging me.
The images I have generated are perfect quality when viewed in Adobe Lightroom, iPhoto or any other app, but in iMovie there appear to be far fewer colours so that (for example) the sky in an image is heavily pixelated. I can only guess there are fewer colours in the image.
I am confused because in one of the articles I read it claimed that iMovie was directly accessing the file on disk.
I simply dragged and dropped the hi-res images (they are all between 5 and 15 meg size) into iMovie.
Has anyone else come across this? How can I make the images in iMovie look proper so that I can export the

Are our events all co-mingled? Since ownership is ignored I assume we can see each other's video clips? This seems pretty messy to me and prevents any sort of privacy. In fact this basically breaks the whole user model.
Since still images are not stored as an event in iMovie '08, adding an image from iPhoto, your desktop, etc. adds a copy of the file to you project to serve as the "source" for later export of your project. In addition, since there is a maximum size associated with your project, this "stored" image may be scaled if the original height is greater than 1080 pixels. Therefore, my recommendation was to actually look at the "stored, scaled" file in your project so as to compare it with your original files to see there there was any loss in image quality. You can manually open the project "package" using the "contextual" menu option "Show Package Contents" at the Finder level.
I opened it in iMovie but can't see that option nor an option for setting colours to millions (which would probably solve my problem).
The ideal here is to open the file stored in your project and look at it in the QT Player for comparison with the original file. When I said "color depth should be millions," I was referring to the color depth you should find in the inspector window when you open the files in the QT player. Both should normally read "millions" unless you saved them otherwise.

Poor image quality using iMovie 8 or iDVD after importing DV file via FW

Hello,
i am a complete newby and asking for help. I have bought a Panasonic NV-GS320EG-S miniDV Camcorder. First i connected it via S-Video to my Pioneer Plasma which worked fine.
I have connected the camcorder via Firewire to my iMac 20/2,4 GHz, camcorder will launch import window, streaming works but in iMovie the image quality is already rather poor. I can cut files and all but after using Import film and burning it with latest Toast, picture quality is even worse, that means colors are natural but no sharpness, lots of shivering lines as soon as the angle is moving.
I've tried to import directly into iDVD with the direct transfer function for Firewire which works technically as well but the result is mainly the same, when i burn the DVD the picture quality gets far worse than via S-Video connection.
Last thing i tried is importing to iMovie, importing for media browser and reopening file in iDVD which burns the DVD later, all that works technically fine, but the image result remains absolutely poor, my wife meant inacceptable...
Any ideas what that could be??? I've always imported and exported the film with the largest picture mode possible...

I am using the Panasonic HDC-SD5 camcorder which records in AVCHD.
I also have a JVC miniDV camcorder.
The following is available in iMovie 08 help:If the larger sizes are not available, the original project media isn’t large enough to render in that size. The largest media size used in the project determines the final movie sizes you can render.
Tiny: Always 176 by 144 pixels.
Mobile: Always 480 by 272 pixels.
Medium: Varies in size from 640 by 480 pixels (standard aspect ratio) to 640 by 360 pixels (widescreen), depending on the size of the media in your project.
Large: Always 960 by 540 pixels (widescreen). No large size is rendered if your original video isn’t high definition (HD).

Photo image quality in iMovie

Hi ... I am attempting to create an iMovie that will include photos and video footage.
I read that the best presentation quality for the photos would be achieved creating a slideshow in iPhoto and exporting the slideshow, and importing the resulting Quicktime movie into iMovie. This would bypass issues created during the iMovie image rendoring process.
I just did a brief test run using the above steps. The image quality in the Qtime video was not very good.
Am I missing a step in here someplace?
The final show will be played on a large screen, so I am very concerned about image sharpness.
Thank you in advance.
Message was edited by: David Ris

I'm not sure what you mean by media folder, a folder of JPEG files is a media folder as is a folder of audio files.
More Info:
When dragging any folder of high quality photos to iMove it has to change it from stills to video. Apples and oranges; a conversion takes place. I just experimented by exporting iPhoto file of high resolution photos to QuickTime changed the QuickTime resolution from 640 x 480 to 1280 x 800 then imported it into iMovie. Then I exported iPhoto full resolution pictures to my desktop and then dragged them to the time line. These photos have text in the pictures. The original photos are 2581 x 1836 when I played the slide show from iMovie I could not tell the difference from the QuickTime movie that I placed in the time line and the full quality photos exported to a folder on my desktop then dragged to the same timeline as I did the QuickTime movie. However the QuickTime movie played independently in QuickTime was far superior to the QuickTime Movie played in iMovie on my computer. My monitor is set at 1680 x 1050.
Text in iMove will show Jaggies when viewed at close working range as I mentioned in an earlier post you must view iMovie at the proper viewing distance because your slides have been converted to video. Drag one of your slides to the desktop you will see that it becomes; example > Still 10.dv > in QuickTime format, no longer a JPEG file. Once you export your slide show to QuickTime you don't have the editing ease of moving your pictures position, changing slide duration, music etc.
For others to view your movies you will eventually have to burn your slide show in iDVD unless you are using your computer and a projector. An hour long iMovie can become a very large file about 10 GB but will play very nicely from a computer. Burn that movie to iDVD it will become about 1GB.
Dick

Image quality in iMovie 11

I'm working on a personal documentary with 16mm footage (it's been de-interlaced) , but because I have a non OpenCL iMac I'm relegated to using iMovie 11 for the time being for budget reasons. I will also upconvert my 16mm film footage to HD so I can take advantage of the higher rez for all the stills I will be using in this documentary. What is the story on iMovie 11 image quality? I understand that FCP X has many more features, but would any given moment in my documentary look the same as FCP X, or does iMovie just not look as good.

It sounds like the hard disk space could be the culprit.
I would recommend you get an external drive. You need to move some of your events to the external drive to free up space. This must be done within iMovie. Let us know if you need help with this. (or search the discussions for how to move events)

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I read in November's Macworld that if I use a tapeless camcorder, "you won't get the best image quality if you use iMovie '08 because the software converts each movie clip to smaller, more manageable size. To get the highest quality you'll need to be running Final Cut Pro on a Mac Pro with at least 2GB of RAM." Do you all agree with this? And if so, please consider the following. I used a mini DV camcorder to transfer all my tapes to my computer and to an external hard drive. Have I already lost that image quality in doing so using iMovie? If so, can Final Cut Pro import from iMovie and improve that quality by decompressing or will I need to retransfer the tapes using Final Cut Pro or will the difference be too negligible to be noticed and not to bother. Thanks, SWestD

I read in November's Macworld that if I use a tapeless camcorder, "you won't get the best image quality if you use iMovie '08 because the software converts each movie clip to smaller, more manageable size. To get the highest quality you'll need to be running Final Cut Pro on a Mac Pro with at least 2GB of RAM." Do you all agree with this?
It depends on the format. In general, the consumer tapeless cameras shoot some highly compressed variant of the mpeg2 or mpeg4 format (delivery formats). These formats are not designed to be edited but rather to be displayed directly from the camera to the TV. In order to edit the material, you must first convert the files from their delivery format to something editiable. This conversion usually results in LARGER not smaller files. There is the potential for some minimal alteration of the image in the transcoding process. This is the trade-off for shooting with such a compressed format.
And if so, please consider the following. I used a mini DV camcorder to transfer all my tapes to my computer and to an external hard drive. Have I already lost that image quality in doing so using iMovie?
No, capturing DV material from tapes using iMovie is a direct digital transfer. DV/NTSC or DV/PAL video as captured from tape is the muxed (mixed audio and video) DV stream. It is an exact replica of what is on the tape.
If so, can Final Cut Pro import from iMovie and improve that quality by decompressing or will I need to retransfer the tapes using Final Cut Pro or will the difference be too negligible to be noticed and not to bother.
FCE and FCP capture material from tapes slightly differently than iMovie. While iMovie brings the material from the tape unaltered, FCE/FCP uses Quicktime during capture to pull the audio and video into separate streams with in the resulting file. By having the audio demuxed, the programs are able to edit multiple video streams simultaneously while iMovie is limited on one at a time. The video quality is not altered in this demuxing process.
If you choose to shoot with a tapeless camera and edit the material in FCE or FCP, FCP has a wider range of formats that can be handled by the program, but in no way will it deal with them all. Many still need to be converted into an edit friendly format before you bring them into the program.
x

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Hi everyone,
I've noticed that when I'm editing with PSE and have the view set so that the photo fits the screen (which means, it's very much zoomed out), the quality of the photo suffers. Almost like there's some pixelation, but not really. I apologize for the unclear explanation, I just don't know what the term is for this loss of quality when zoomed out a lot. I don't mean to disparage PSE, which is a great program, but I don't have this problem with another (free) program I also use. I'm just trying to find out if it's something in my display settings that I can change or some other way I can fix this. I often like to see the whole picture when editing but it's almost impossible to do editing when looking at the whole picture in PSE since it looks so off.
Thank you.

The image size are 1600x1200 or larger and should be adequate in size. Anyone know how to improve the quality of the stills? I feel it may have something to do with the program resizing/ downsizing the pics.
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I'm trying to display a PNG as a title screen for a game. I'm quite the newb, as the image itself will attest.
Source: http://i30.tinypic.com/sfw96o.png
Screenshot result: http://i25.tinypic.com/29m2d6v.png
I've got all the RenderingHints turned to the quality settings, and use the following image loading/drawing code to put the freshly loaded image into a BufferedImage for later use:
g2.drawImage((new ImageIcon(getClass().getClassLoader().getResource("assets/title.png"))).getImage(),0,0,null);Any ideas? I'm hoping that this is something that people have seen before, but I'm happy to provide more code upon request.

>
Thanks for the reply again. Since Numain's example causes the same loss of color depth on my machine, I've just modified it:>Huh...
OK - I tried your source, and like Numain, failed to see the problem on my PC - the image appeared in the frame at the full color depth.
There were some slightly suspicious aspects to that source, so I have changed them, and made a few other changes to get more information. Run the source below and post back your results, but most importantly, does the problem still happen using this source?
Here are my results..
java.vm.version:      1.6.0-b105
java.vendor:      Sun Microsystems Inc.
os.name:      Windows XP
os.arch:      x86
os.version:      5.1
*** end system props
GraphicsEnvironment: sun.awt.Win32GraphicsEnvironment@9f671b
GraphicsDevice: Win32GraphicsDevice[screen=0]
GraphicsConfiguration: sun.awt.Win32GraphicsConfig@1b9240e
[dev=Win32GraphicsDevice[screen=0],pixfmt=0]
DisplayMode - bitdepth/WxH: 24/1024x768
ColorModel (screen): ColorModel: #pixelBits = 24 numComponents = 3
color space = java.awt.color.ICC_ColorSpace@ca0115
transparency = 1 has alpha = false isAlphaPre = false
*** end screen props
Read start:      Sat Mar 22 20:11:51 EST 2008
Read end:      Sat Mar 22 20:17:04 EST 2008
*** end image load
ColorModel: ColorModel: #pixelBits = 32 numComponents = 4
color space = java.awt.color.ICC_ColorSpace@ca0115
transparency = 3 has alpha = true isAlphaPre = false
true is Error? false
*** end cons..:      Sat Mar 22 20:17:04 EST 2008The code used.
import java.awt.*;
import java.awt.image.*;
import javax.swing.*;
import javax.imageio.ImageIO;
import java.net.URL;
import java.util.Date;
public class PngQuality extends JPanel {
private BufferedImage image;
public PngQuality() throws Exception {
    URL imageUrl = new URL("http://i30.tinypic.com/sfw96o.png");
    GraphicsEnvironment ge = GraphicsEnvironment.
      getLocalGraphicsEnvironment();
    System.out.println( "GraphicsEnvironment: " + ge );
    GraphicsDevice gd = ge.getDefaultScreenDevice();
    System.out.println("GraphicsDevice: " + gd);
    GraphicsConfiguration gc = gd.getDefaultConfiguration();
    System.out.println("GraphicsConfiguration: " + gc);
    DisplayMode dm = gd.getDisplayMode();
    System.out.println("DisplayMode - bitdepth/WxH: " +
      dm.getBitDepth() + "/" +
      dm.getWidth() + "x" +
      dm.getHeight()
    ColorModel cmScreen = gc.getColorModel();
    System.out.println("ColorModel (screen): " + cmScreen);
    System.out.println("*** end screen props");
    // read the image..
    System.out.println("Read start: \t" + new Date() );
    image = ImageIO.read(imageUrl);
    System.out.println("Read end: \t" + new Date() );
    System.out.println("*** end image load");
    setPreferredSize(new Dimension(800, 600));
    MediaTracker tracker = new MediaTracker(this);
    tracker.addImage(image, 0);
    /* Thought it might be useful.. */
    String[] properties = image.getPropertyNames();
    if (properties!=null) {
      for (int ii=0; ii<properties.length; ii++) {
        System.out.println(
          properties[ii] +
          ": " +
          image.getProperty( properties[ii] )
    /* Check the color model.. */
    ColorModel cm = image.getColorModel();
    System.out.println("ColorModel: " + cm);
    // I get the impression that ImageIO.read blocks and
    // this is redundant, but keep for the moment.
    try {
      tracker.waitForAll();
    } catch(InterruptedException ie) {
      ie.printStackTrace();
    // Is there any error loading the image, in that VM?
    System.out.println("" + tracker.checkAll() +
      " is Error? " + tracker.isErrorAny()
    System.out.println("*** end cons..: \t" + new Date() );
protected void paintComponent(Graphics g) {
    // did you not read my advice about the ImageObserver?
    // What am I ..talkin' to myself here?
    g.drawImage(image, 0, 0, this);
public static void main(String[] args) {
    /* Get some basic info. */
    String[] sysProp = {
      "java.vm.version",
      "java.vendor",
      "os.name",
      "os.arch",
      "os.version"
    for (int ii=0; ii<sysProp.length; ii++) {
      System.out.println( sysProp[ii] +
        ": \t" +
        System.getProperty(sysProp[ii]) );
    System.out.println("*** end system props");
    // best to invoke a runnable to create the GUI
    Runnable r = new Runnable() {
      public void run() {
        JFrame f = new JFrame();
        f.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);
        try {
          f.getContentPane().add(new PngQuality());
        } catch(Exception e) {
          f.getContentPane().add(
            new JLabel("See Stacktrace!"));
          e.printStackTrace();
        f.pack();
        f.setLocationRelativeTo(null);
        f.setVisible(true);
    EventQueue.invokeLater(r);
}Oh, and AFAIR is a less common variant of AFAIK. As Far As I Recall/As Far As I Remember.
My apologies for tossing about obscure abbreviations.
There was a thread on usenet I vaguely recall where some nonser wished to implement a JProgressBar for an image download. Everyone pointed out that images properly displayed within a Java based ImageObserver would provide a better (+ prettier and more relevant) download indicator. GIF images will (or at least, can) show 'low detail' before full download. JPEG will scan down from the top to the bottom of an image. Someone pointed out that PNG supports (I think it was) a number of different mechanisms for 'quick low-detail display'.
Oddly, this is one of the few instances I've seen where the (apparently) blocking behavior of the ImageIO.read() calls for a JPB/ProgressMonitorInputStream.
Edit 1:
ColorModel and GraphicsConfiguration info. line wrapped for better formatting.
P.S. Can you tell from my output, why I commented on the image size? ;-)
Edited by: AndrewThompson64 on Mar 22, 2008 9:46 AM

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Karl Peterson said,
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<Edited by Moderator>

I Feel your pain guys! The problem is, you are creating the comp in AE with the incorrect Size. I experienced the same problem for months and actually went back and forth between DVDSP and Photoshop until the overlays fit. After extreme headaches I decided to try something different.
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Message was edited by: Erbsenroller
Message was edited by: Erbsenroller

Hi Nathan,
You are my hero I must have activated a filter accidentally. Thanks so much for your help.
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Hi everyone
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Here you go with a screenshot:
http://www20.zippyshare.com/v/38662055/file.html
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If you want me to upload it elsewhere, let me know.

Re: Sudden loss of project image quality in iMovie 11

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