Canon XL1 with Final cut Pro Express and IDVD (Not very good results)

Hi(Bonjour)!

iDVD burn only Standard def DVD, that's why your movie is not +on par+ with your HD TV set.

You can't expect crystal result when you monitor Standard def content on HD TV set, as SD is upscaled to fit your screen.

Disney's, and all majors, works with prime quality HD content (with a 4K res), color corrected, multi-thousands dollars hardware and software for compression and professional people. Tha's why their movies look so good on DVDs.

Try your DVD on standard def monitor, I'm pretty sure that you'll be happy with the results.

Michel Boissonneault

Just export to a normal Quicktime Movie (File > Export > Quicktime Movie) and uncheck the +Make Movie Self Contained+ box. iDVD will handle the compression to make it fit on your DVD no matter what the size. It shouldn't look that much worse than the Quicktime Movie. As Michel said, any worse results you might get are probably due to burning onto SD DVDs. iDVD can not burn onto HD DVDs.

The Canon XL1 is an excellent camcorder, but it is SD - miniDV camcorder. One cannot get HD out of it. After burning standard or DL-DVD (depending on length of the video) in iDVD, the quality will be as good as can be done on SD. It should not look all that bad on HDTV. The TV will do the best it can with the scaling and filtering of the SD material, and should not look really all that bad, with the exception of having less detail, than can be achieved by HD source.

Message was edited by: ComPH1

iDVD will compress the 25GB into SD MPEG-2 PS, which will fit 100 minutes onto standard DVD+/-R. H.264 is MPEG4 part 10 and is not used by standard DVD's, just by High def ones. The 25 GB is an intermediate, lightly compressed format. it is not used by the DVD players nor by the TV's.

You say that the quality is good, directly from the camcorder to the TV (what type of interface are you using in that connection?). You are editing with FCE(4?) and burning in iDVD. 1 - when you are importing the stream into FCE, make sure that the camcorder setting matches the FCE setting. As anexperiment, try not to do much editing and output via File>Export>QuickTime Movie, as suggested previously. Burn an iDVD disc. If you still have quality problem, try Toast. these iMovie and iDVD programs are not for very discriminating users. Don't bother with the menus and other bells&whistles at first. Make sure you have a good DVD player and good connection to your TV, preferrably HDMI. Try not to do upconversion in the DVD player, let the TV do it. It knows the diplay technology it drives and will do better job upconverting and filtering the image than the DVD player, that does "general" upconversion.

2-iDVD will not burn h.264 and the DVD player will not play such stream. DVD player only plays MPEG-2 Program stream.

3 - I used to have that camcorder and didn't have quality issues burning DVD's with it. I mostly use Toast though. If you still have issues, you'd have to publish all the settings you are using for the camcorder, FCE and DVD authoring S/W to troubleshoot this furhter.

4 - Does your DVD player usually give you the video quality you would like to see?