Digital Video Quality

[Charles Pearson]

Ladies and Gentlemen,

That sensation that you felt was the collective IQ of this list 
dropping about 100 points when I joined. Dwayne informed me over at 
Applelinks that the fine folks over here were quite knowledgeable and 
that I may well learn a thing or two. So it's his fault that you have 
to put up with my less than brilliant questions.

My question has to do with digital video quality. I use a dv camcorder 
to record the life of my family (sports, special events, kids doing 
what kids do <smile>) and I use my powerbook to make movies of this. I 
have noticed a substantial loss of quality from what the original dv 
tape looks like to what I get on the other side of iMovie. I think I am 
setting every “quality” setting to as high as possible, yet iDVD 4, 
Toast 6, and even back to dv tape seem to produce less than DVD quality 
images; especially my children’s sports where the action and my 
camcorder are moving (on a quality tripod by the way). If I watch the 
original recorded dv tape directly from the camcorder to my TV the 
images are remarkable. I have often thought, “Wow, that picture looks 
great!” Yet, once I use iMovie to well…make a movie of it, the result 
is not so “wow, that picture looks great”. I am currently using iMovie 
4.0.1 and iDVD 4.0.1. I have importing directly into iMovie using the 
firewire import onto my 667 Powerbook with a gig of ram. Am I doing 
something wrong? Is a loss of digital quality to actually be expected? 
Can you give me some advice or direction? Thanks in advance.

Chuck Pearson
John 17:3