[MacDV] Digital Video Quality

[Heather Donahue]

On 5/27/04 8:08 AM, "Charles Pearson" <pearson at tidewaterbaptist.org> wrote:

> 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 ³quality² 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 children¹s 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, ³Wow, that picture looks
> great!² Yet, once I use iMovie to wellŠmake a movie of it, the result
> is not so ³wow, that picture looks great². 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.

If you edit the DV and then export back to the DV camcorder you shouldn't
see any loss in quality.  Edit in iMovie, then feed it back to the
camcorder.  Then play the camcorder output to your TV.  The quality should
be at it's best here.

If you are looking at the video in iMovie or in the QuickTime player, the
quality will seem lower.  I think iMovie should look better than the QT
player but if I recall, iMovie doesn't show the video at full quality
either.

To see the full quality in QT player, and assuming you have the Pro version,
open the edited DV in the QT player.  Then go to the menu Movie:Get Movie
Properties.  You'll see a window pop-up with two menus, under the left one
select Video Track, under the right one select Quality.  Then click on "High
Quality Enabled"  The DV should look as good as your monitor can show it.
You might notice lines but that's normal as the DV is interlaced and your
computer display is not.  You can select "Deinterlace Fields" if it's there
or "Single Field" if it's not, it will lose some sharpness on your display
but the lines will go away.

You don't need to save these changes to your DV file, iDVD will always use
the full quality to render the DVD.

Just remember, while DV format looks pretty good to the human eye, it is
already compressed 5 to 1.  Compressing to DVD will compress even further,
depending on how much you need to fit on a disc.