Bad playback quality on lcd 1080P 32 inch monitor.

Hi

This is hard. I have no 1900x1080 monitor that makes me Your equal or HD Camera.

a. 4x3 CRT standard D TV has about 1/5 - 1/6 of the info/pixles needed to do HD 1900x1080

b. Best Quality - is not always the BEST. I use to use Best Performances OR
in iDVD08 ProQuality encoding (which I love)

The best way to ruin a movie project especially if it contains photos is to use the
Share/Export to iDVD from inside iMovie and let iMovie render the Project.
This harms the DVD result but also the iMovie project. Photos needs to be re-imported
and re-edited.

I do:
• Close iMovie or in FCE/P Save as QuickTime .mov (not selfcontaining or QT-conversion)
• Open iDVD and import the movie project or the QT.mov file

*Other things that affects the End-Result is (collected and NOT Structured material):*

1. iDVD 8 has three levels of qualities.
iDVD 6 has the two last ones
• Professional Quality (movies up to 120 min.) - BEST
• Best Performances (movies less than 60 min.) - High quality on final DVD
• High Quality (in iDVD08) / Best Quality (in iDVD6) (movies up to 120 min.) - slightly lower quality than above

2. From
• FCE/P - Export out as full quality QuickTime.mov (not selfcontaining, no conversion)
• iMovie x-6 - Don't use ”Share/Export to iDVD” = destructive even to movie project and especially so
when the movie includes photos. Instead just drop or import the iMovie movie project icon (with a Star on it) into iDVD theme window.
• iMovie’08 not meant to go to iDVD. Use iMovie HD 6

3. I use Roxio Toast™ to make an as *slow burn as possibly eg x1* (in iDVD’08 this can also be set)
This can also be done with (Apple) Disk Util tool.

4. There *has to be about or more than 25Gb free space on internal* (start-up) hard disk. iDVD can't
use an external one as scratch disk (if it is not start-up disc).

5. Verbatim ( also recommended by many - Taiyo Yuden DVDs - I can’t get hold of it to test )

6. DVD-R (no +R or +/-RW)

7. Keep NTSC to NTSC - or - PAL to PAL when going from iMovie to iDVD

8. Don’t burn more than three DVD at a time - but let the laser cool off for a while befor next batch.

iDVD quality depends on:

• HOW much free space is there on Your internal (start-up) hard disk. Go for approx 25Gb.
less than 5Gb and Your result will most probably not play.

• What *kind of movie project* You drop into it. MPEG4 seems to be a bad choice.

• What kind of standard - NTSC movie and NTSC DVD or PAL to PAL - no mix.
(If You need to change to do a NTSC DVD from PAL material let JES Deinterlacer3.2.2 do the conversion)
(Dropping a PAL movie into a NTSC iDVD project
(US) NTSC DVDs most often are playable in EU
(EU) PAL DVDs most often needs to be converted to play in US
UNLESS: They are plabacked by a Mac - then You need not to care

• What kind of DVDs You are using. I use Verbatim DVD-R (this brand AND no +R or +/-RW)

• How You encode and burn it. Two settings prior iDVD08
Pro Quality (only in iDVD08)
Best / High Quality (not always - most often not)
Best / High Performances (most often my choise)

1. go to iDVD pref. menu and select tab far right and set burn speed to x1 (less errors = plays better) - only in iDVD08
2. Project info: Select Professional Encoding - only in iDVD08.

Region codes:
iDVD - only burn Region = 0 - meaning - DVDs are playable everywhere

DVD Studio pro can set Region codes:
1 = US
2 = EU

Yours Bengt W

Pat:

If you get an answer to this, will you please share it with me? I am at "robertpj at frontiernet dot net" I just spent another hour on the phone with Apple on this subject and the only answer seems to be to buy Final Cut Pro, burn at the HD settings, and burn on Blue Ray.

In the meantime, the resolution coming out of Apple's DVD burner seems to be very poor. I burned a 34mb photo and it compressed it to about 178k.

Thanks.

Bob

Edited by: Moderator - edited email address

I have exactly the same problem as you. My iDVD 08 project looks excellent on CRT TV but very blur on LCD TV. Still figuring out what is happening ....

iMovie is designed to play back on a standard interlaced TV. That's why it looks good on your Sony Trinitron.

Your 1080P LCD TV is displaying in progressive mode. I don't have a flat screen TV but understand that many flat screen TVs have adjustment settings to allow it to display in interlaced mode. If yours has that, set it for interlaced display and see if there is any improvement.

I'm not a tech expert by any means. It occurs to me, however, that one possibility might be to deinterlace your movie (first make a backup copy) and then see if it plays better on your 1080P TV.

You can deinterlace using the free download STREAMCLIP or another program called JES Deinterlacer.

I have no idea if the above will work, but I sure wouldn't scrap all of your old equipment.

Also, there are some others on this forum who are quite expert and they have not weighed in yet. Another possibility is to talk to the Apple experts at an Apple store.

As an additional note, I have seen iM6 movie projects played back beautifully on large flat screen TVs. I just did a wedding video and it played fine on a very large flat screen. So there has got to be an answer for your situation, if we haven't hit on it already, and hopefully someone more knowledgable than I will weigh in here. It could be something other than an interlacing problem. Maybe a field dominace problem, or some adjustment that you can make to your TV or DVD player.