Newbie question about .dv stuff

[Metallirat]

Hi,
I am new at this and its hard for me to explain so bear with me. I recently purchased a canopus ADVC 100 and have used it to import some of my old vhs tapes and put them on dvd. Lately I have wanted to record some tv shows with it too. I hooked it up and everything worked and i imported about a 1 minute clip into imovie. When i export I set the settings to DV stream (size doesn't matter just quality). when i open the file in quicktime everything is scaled wrong. Now i know that dv is 720 x 480 and my tv that im capturing from is 640X480. I tried changing the dv file to 640X480 with quicktime (pro). but it doesnt match up exactly with the imovie window. Also there is some black bars around the edges video. I also know this is because video that is sent through cable is slightly taller and wider than what you see. Basicly what i want to end up doing is, Capture in Imovie or a better program if someone has a suggestion, export it and encode it into divx or vcd (using ffmpeg), and i want it to look just as I saw it when i watched it. Thanks for reading this and hopefully i made some sort of sense.

[WiseWeasel]

You are capturing it fine, it's just a problem of exporting it correctly. When you export from iMovie 3.x, you want to be exporting to QuickTime, and as export settings. When you choose QuickTime - Full Quality DV, it actually downsamples your audio to 32 kHz, seriously degrading your sound quality. Choose 'To QuickTime' and 'Expert Settings...', hit the 'Export' button, and in the next window that pops up, change the 'Export' popup menu to 'Movie, self-contained' and set a filename.mov to save as. This preserves the original quality and aspect ratio you captured in. Then, you can use ffmpegX or whatever to convert the .mov to the final compressed format.

[Metallirat]

Hi,
I tried what you said and exported it as movie self contained and when i opened the .mov the persons face was wider than what it showed in iMovie. Is the .mov correct and maybe the iMovie one scaled wrong?