The saga continues: my quest for good video

Question

on previous discussions here and on the iMovie thread, i detailed my frustration with video attained with my Vixia HV30 (HDV) camcorder. i obtained FCE because i thought my problems might be related to my old iMovie HD 6. the problem persisted: staggering video that seemed to stagger roughly every four seconds. this was observed even with the ingested source played within iMovie or FCE. much phone time with apple product specialists. clips carried to other computers showed the same staggering in the same places. camera carried to other computers (at apple retail store, more time with a product specialist) produced the same staggering when footage was ingested there. this convinced me that the problem was in the camera, not on my computer (new display, new graphics card, problem predated both).
canon serviced the camera and "it was found that the part was inoperative the device could not communicate with the computer." i found this encouraging and hastened to test. alas, the same problem was there and it was now not focusing correctly which had been fixed earlier.
after a period of head banging on wall, i went to best buy and purchased a HF S10 (figuring i could return for the restocking fee and essentially "rent" an HD camera to test with).
my first experience with AVCHD so had to do a little learning. reshot my test and ingested the video.
what a beautiful, sharp image. THIS is what i expect from an HD camera.
source clip played perfectly in the canvas (something that did not happen before). thrilled, i produced a 1280x720 clip (the size vimeo prefers for HD video) and eagerly watched in the QT player.
same staggering. WHAT?
recalled that one of the product specialists i talked to was not all that enthusiastic about the QT player, so i played the same clip using VLC. perfect. WHAT?
output to AppleTV. perfect. output to iPhone. perfect. output in a variety of SD sizes. QT always had the stagger at the same 4 second interval (harder to see on the smaller sizes, but still there). VLC always played with no problems.
am having a hard time understanding this. is it an encoding issue that QT can't handle, but VLC can?
i can play HD movie trailers from Apple that are way larger than what i have produced and they play just fine, so i don't think it is the player per se. why is this happening?
and my other big question is would FCS compressor program do a better encoding job that would avoid this?
just for reference, the "vimeo" clip mentioned above has a data rate of 10.87 mbits/s
Message was edited by: Forrest Jerome1

Answer 1

tom, here is the clip. this is 1280x720 de-interlaced. when i play this using QT player, the clip staggers roughly every four seconds (i suspect it is between 4 and 5, but i am just counting, not clocking). it is noticeable once the train gets rolling. when i play in VLC, there is no stagger.
the first stagger i can detect happens at about 20 sec. then 23, then 28 and so on.
once i loaded the clip to my iDisk, i played it to make sure it had loaded correctly. playing it within Safari, the stagger is still there, but significantly reduced. just something else to confuse me, i guess.
http://homepage.mac.com/fjerome/flix/SF10%20test.mov
Message was edited by: Forrest Jerome1