[DM-MUG] iMovie quality help! Please.

[Darcy Baston]

I've had this problem with iMovie all the time. It makes everything all pixelated. And then when you put text over it, it looks horrible too.

Until...and here's the part I don't get, you export it. Once you export it to a high quality media setting, everything cleans up. You won't see it in iMovie itself, but you will in the resulting movie. What I have always done to keep up the quality, is export to DV format, and then use Quicktime Pro to compress it down using mp4 settings that I choose myself depending on how much quality  I want to keep. There's  a free mp4 plugin called 3ivx I think that handles mp4 MUCH better than Apple's native implementation does. For best size/performance/quality, you should also resize the resulting movie into a size that is divisible by 8 (I think). I can't remember now as I write this, but it has something to do with how Altivec functions work best when there is a specific even division with the movie size.

I discovered all this while capturing/encoding VHS movies using a Formac StudioTVR device. The playback quality was higher and played back with fewer dropped frames when I paid attention to divisible numbers.

Anyway, export to DV and try playing it in Quicktime first to see if the quality improves ok? It's what I was doing when I discovered how poorly iMovie previews movies based on images/titles and not video footage.

Darcy
 
On Thursday, May 12, 2005, at 12:33PM, kcrouch <kcrouch@klccomputing.com> wrote:

>I'm scanning images and then trying to import them into iMovie. The images look great until iMovie (4.0.1). All of the 
>quality is gone. They're crap. What am I doing wrong? I've adjusted the size and scanned at different resolutions. 
>Nothing is working. Give me some help.
>
>Kendall Crouch
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