DV video quality

That is a bummer. I hoped they would address this issue in 09 but I forgot that Apple has tendency to not care too much about aging technology. 😟

Perhaps it is because iMovie08/09 relies on core video and quartz engine so much and not solely on Quicktime as iMovieHD. It is my guess only, but it is much easier to passthrough DV as is in iMovieHD because it was written with DV in mind.

If you open up contents of an iMovieHD project, there is a small size quicktime file that contains the entire cut of your project. It is a reference movie that has cut information and points to the source and rendered clips used in the project. So when you cut movies together in iMovieHD you are simply coping and pasting the sources into this reference container. This is why all the transitions and effects have to rendered to DV all the time even if they could be previewed in realtime in much higher quality, in which case core video is used. When exporting iMovieHD uses all the original source videos, unless rendered for any effects or transitions, so that the highest quality is preserved. The downside is that you cannot directly use core video or quartz engine in the timeline to enjoy realtime rendering, and you cannot mix up different format movies in one timeline without conversion.

It seems that iMovie08/09 works much more sophisticated internally to enable all realtime workflow and multi format timeline. It's probably much more complex to source back to original DV for exporting, and if they didn't do it for 08->09 upgrade the chance is getting slimmer that it will ever bring it back. :-/

I remember at the time I made the DVD I thought that iMovie was sending DV to iDVD. Why? Because the rendering for SHARE/iDVD was so fast. It was DV, but it has been transformed somehow. It is not the original DV.

but I forgot that Apple has tendency to not care too much about aging technology.

http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=8903113#8903113

Nobody told me. I see it myself.

Using a DV movie as input in iM09 gives me bad quality inside iM09 and (of course) on every export.
You are right, iM09 has not converted the original file during import but it can't process it with all information.
What ever happend inside iM09, using a DV streams as input file gives me a poor quality inside iM09 and for the exported movies.

I can solve the Problem by converting the DV-footage to AIC before importing in iM09. This prooves that iM09 has some strange problems with DV-footage.

I used the "new" share to iDVD yes.

The file that was created from iMovie 09 is as follows:

Apple Intermediate Codec, 960 x 540, Millions
16-bit Integer (Little Endian), Stereo (L R), 48.000 kHz

High Quality is ticked by default but when switching off doesn't appear to make any difference. Single Field is not ticked but again doesn't appear to make much difference whether ticked or not.

I did an export as PAL DV (I'm in the UK) and the quality is still a little grainy and not as good as iMovie HD. I might do some more testing in this area though as in theory I shouldn't get any worse quality than exporting from Final Cut.

Ah. Final Cut creates a reference movie of course so nothing is re-encoded, unlike iMovie which re-encodes the movie and makes another copy of the footage.

So the original DV file is used by Final Cut and the only time it's re-encoded is when the MPEG2 is made by iDVD.

So the original DV file is used by Final Cut and the only time it's re-encoded is when the MPEG2 is made by iDVD

Exactly the same as in iMovie 6.

Can't speak for iMovie 9 as it is still a week or so from being installed!

"Apple Intermediate Codec, 960 x 540, Millions
16-bit Integer (Little Endian), Stereo (L R), 48.000 kHz"

That makes sense to me since it's how I recommend doing it my book. But, I also recommend as others have, that you externally convert DV to AIC before importing into iM. If you do not do this -- iM is using only 1 field that is upscaled from 240 to 540. It will look bad!

Which means Apple simply added a Share to iDVD command, but did nothing about quality.

So is there a way to work around this issue for DV?

I'm trying to export as a DV stream but not complete yet. I have Final Cut Express, Quicktime Pro and some other apps so I'm not short of tools. I'd like to use iMovie '09 as it looks fun and useful but without being able to get the footage out it's a bit useless.

Although I've been an iMovie user for a few years now I wasn't close to the issues with iMovie 08 as I gave up with it in the very early stages.

What's your book Steve?

Is the Single Field Processing issue only impacting exports where DV is the source video? If my source video was of a different type, would single field processing produce similar quality issues?

Steve. Converting DV footage to AIC to preserve quality.... can this work with edited movies? Or only with pre-edited footage? If it doesn't work with edited movies, do you have a suggestion on how to export out of 08 with minimal quality loss? I'm looking to archive my imovie 08 movies to a Quicktime file to possibly use at a later date. I have FCE 3.5.1 and know I can export to XML files to import into FCE but many aspect of the movie is lost in the process. Thoughts?

Joerg - For me iMovie 09 imports the file as a standard DV file and the quality inside the viewer is the same as iMovie HD. It's only when I export the footage I have a quality issue. I've also checked the files that are imported against iMovie HD and they are the same DV files of the same type and size.

What are you doing to see a degradation in the application viewer itself?

here is a little commercial i made with imovie09 greenscreen
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONyxJVMJFdo&feature=channel_page

In iMovieHD you can set the quality for the preview-window. If you set it to "optimum" (don't know the exact name in the english-version) you shoud see the original DV-quality (identically to playing the DV with QT).
In iM09 you should always see the highest quality but with DV you get only the low resolution and what ever you do in iM09, you only get half of the original footage-information.