Poor DVD Quality - Camcorder to imovie08 to iDVD

Karl K · Member Joined: 26 Apr 2008 Location: Canada

I have made a few DVD's using two different camcorders of a show group my wife belongs to. In all instances, the final quality of the DVD in full screen is watch-able but no where close to what I thought it would be . Here is the details of how I am doing this. I record the video on an old digital 8 camcorder (Sony DCR-TRV130) and import into imovie08 via firewire. From there, I publish the movie as large (960 X 540) which is the largest you can. I then opened iDVD and dragged the movies into the project and burnt it. There is a total of 15:30 of video (plus the opening page that Apple includes for the menu) on my DVD and it is 1.1 GB in size. Am I doing anything wrong or it is normal that the video quality would be half what a commercial DVD would be?

aedipuss · aBigMeanie Joined: 25 Oct 2005 Location: 666th portal

i'm not an apple user so if i'm wrong, sorry, but there seems to be an extra encoding step in your workflow that may be reducing quality. try to export as dvd spec mpeg-2 from imovie and then idvd shouldn't have to re-encoded to dvd spec. 720x480 mpeg-2 with ac-3 or pcm audio is what you need for dvd. click the "what is" dvd link in the upper left for full specs.
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pepegot1 · Member Joined: 08 Aug 2002 Location: South Florida

Work smart. Dump the DV into a good DVR. Now you have a DVD ready to go or be edited.

Baldrick · Administrator Joined: 09 Aug 2000 Location: Sweden

Moving you to our mac section.

edDV · Posted: Apr 26, 2008 12:57

Normal practice is Firewire transfer to iMovie as 720x480i, then edit, then encode to 720x480i DVD.

The rescale from 720x480i to 960x540p and then downscale encode to 720x480i is killing your DV cam video quality.
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Frobozz · Member Joined: 23 Dec 2003 Location: Eugene, Oregon

Do not resize your video to 960x540. That causes the interpolation of extra pixels that will blur the image. Also, it then needs to get rescaled back to 720x480 NTSC or 750x576 PAL so there is more loss that can occur. I believe the flaw in your process is changing the source resolution to anything but its native size.

Karl K · Member Joined: 26 Apr 2008 Location: Canada

Thanks to all for such speedy responses. I have reconnected my video camera and tried your suggestions. Unless there is something that I am really missing, I have no choice in how I import video into imovie outside of whether I choose the isight camera or the digital camera attached (the preference pane does not include choices as to how video is imported.) I tried imovie HD to see if that gave me a choice and it did not either but I have noticed that the imported video looks much better full screen than it did with imovie 08. Hmmmm, I am beginning to see why the mac community screamed bloody murder about imovie 08. I will try doing the project again in imovie HD and see how that turns out. Thanks again.

Karl K · Member Joined: 26 Apr 2008 Location: Canada

I redid a portion of my recording using the imovie program that came with ilife 06 (imovie HD.) Again, I had no choice with how to import the video to imovie or export it to iDVD but the results were much better. Can any mac geeks out there explain why the old imovie works so much better?

Frobozz · Member Joined: 23 Dec 2003 Location: Eugene, Oregon

I've reread your first post and you mention viewing the final DVD in full screen. That means you're watching it on your computer display. The video is 720x480 and your computer display is certainly greater than that. I think my iMac's screen is 1680x1050 at its native resolution. If I watch a video DVD at full screen the picture gets zoomed more than four times its actual size. This means three-fourths of the pixels you're viewing are interpolated rather than actual. No wonder it looks poor.

The way to watch video DVDs on a computer display with highest quality is to choose Normal size in DVD Player. It will then show in its actual 720x480 resolution.

Video DVDs are for watching on TV screens. If you want to watch the videos on your computer screen you should choose a format such as MPEG 4.

I don't know why an iMovie HD project looked better than the iMovie 08 version. The DV video should be identical so iDVD should receive and produced the same quality. But you mentioned rescaling your first project to 960 X 540 and if you did that it would explain why the picture looked worse on that version.

lordsmurf · Posted: Apr 28, 2008 00:24

All kinds of things could be wrong, from interlace to import codecs to whatever else. Sounds like you're doing extra steps too.

The D8 is DV material, so do 720x480 and never change it. Be sure interlace is set correctly.
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Karl K · Member Joined: 26 Apr 2008 Location: Canada

found this on an apple discussion page. Seems to answer my question as to why imovie HD better. Thanks again for all your help, I learned a lot.

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1501527&tstart=30

Frobozz · Member Joined: 23 Dec 2003 Location: Eugene, Oregon

Thanks for pointing that out. I wasn't aware that iMovie 08 had those quality problems with DV and possibly other SD video. Now I know and I'm concerned what I'm going to do with the project for a client that I imported via DV to iMovie 08.

rumplestiltskin · Member Joined: 15 Jun 2003 Location: United States

Yet another good reason to avoid iMovie'08. Thanks for the info.