iMovie Poor Import Quality

[Echo]

I just started with iMovie and a DV camcorder (SonyDCR-PC120). iMovie finds the camera and has no trouble importing, but the quality is FAR from DVD quality. At full screen, it has very pronounced jaggies.

When saw the quality of the movies that Apple demos, they are amazing. Is there a preference or feature that I am missing? Aer the Apple iMovie sample heavily doctored? Is it the camcorder I'm using?

Thanks for any help on this.

 

[themacko]

I can't give you any of the tech-jargon to describe this, so I'll put it in plain English. The computer can't display the video at the highest quality while editing and playing back, so it basically looks like crap in iMovie. But that is just how it is being displayed on your computer, when you export it back out to your DV camcorder (or burn it through iDVD) it will look MUCH better.

 

[alexachucarro]

Originally posted by themacko
...it will look MUCH better.

too true.

There are only a handful of graphic cards that can let you do this. Apple desired the editing in iMovie to be non-reliant on the GPU so they made it so the frame rate is preserved (how many pictures a shown each second 29.97 per sec for NTSC) but resolution is dropped.

If they preserved Resolution the playback would skip and play at a frame rate that would piss off (sorry mod) our eyes. It was deemed that fps (frames per second) were more important than resolution.

But don't worry, when you export the original resolution is outputted (that is so not a word!). When I watched my DVD made by iDVD2 it looked fantastic.

Don't fret