[MacDV] Digital Video Quality

[Erica Sadun]

>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 wellŠmake 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,

A couple of things to start with. DVD quality is generally
*lower* than DV quality because MPEG-2 uses higher compression
than DV-25. And don't trust the iMovie preview. Export to
a TV to see the actual quality. Finally, areas of high motion
are always the worst to compress--expect blockiness on DVDs
and possibly in DV.

-- Erica