Mini-DV quality problems for quicktime

[J-girl]

Hi all,

I have tried out a Canon Mini Dv (ZR30 mc) and a Sony mini Dv (I forget the model) from the university I attend.

Quality is great when hooked up to the television.

When I have transferred video to iMovie (yes, I had to borrow an iBook as well!), and then exported to Quicktime in order to burn to a CD, I have not been thrilled about the quality.

Whether I open the burned CD with my movie on the iBook or on my pc notebook, I cannot enlarge the Quicktime screen without the image becoming grainy. Arrrgh!

I did notice, when I went to "Users" on the iBook, and then looked for the folder with various files or whatever for that particular movie, and then opened the Quicktime movie from THERE, that it was clear....like watching it on iMovie.

What is wrong? I would like to be able to send video compilations to friends if only it were clear like that. I don't want them to have to view it in a tiny screen! What is the matter?

Thanks for any help!!

:rant:

[RWB]

What program are you using to capture? On mac's I use Final Cut Pro to capture and edit my video's, on PC I now use Windows Movie Maker 2, which actually does a pretty good job of capturing, then I take it too Final Cut Pro on a Mac for editing later.

[Dexter]

If you have used preset export settings for CD playback, you will likely get a 320 x 240 image. If you expand that to 800 x 600, or more for most laptops these days, it WILL show artifacting. That is the nature of video compression.

If you MUST have better quality at a larger image size, export at full size and full quality. But your exported files will be very large, and if you are using long clips, you may not get them all on a CD.

You may want to consider using MPEG-4, which will give you a higher image quality at lower file size, and can be exported with scalable settings. Quicktime 6 inlcudes the MPEG-4 Codec as part of it's package.

Dexter...

[J-girl]

THANKS!!

I will print out your reply so I can check into all of that!! This is some very helpful info.

Thanks again. :)

[RWB]

Hrm... well I found the issue you're having, I have it too. But in my case I am on a PC, it looks fine in Windows Media Player, but when I play in Quicktime, it looks like a compressed video.

I'm gonna try to export it as a quicktime movie and see how it goes.