Why is the iDVD-burned CD of worse quality than the raw quicktime movie?

Hi

This depends on two to three things

• DVD is as standard - Interlaced SD-Video (at it's best whatever program used to author it)

• iMovie'08 to 11 - can now way known deliver this as they all discard every second line in the picture when going from Event's to Project's - and this can not be mended in after hand. I use

- iMovie HD6 - or -

- FinalCut any version

as they keep 100% to be sent to DVD authoring program

• Video-Codec can in sometime mismatch what iDVD can use (even if it tries) - I use QuickTime .mov (NO QuickTime Conversion - when coming from FinalCut)

of cause I keep same TV-standard trough out all steps from Camera to DVD e.g. PAL/25fps.

Yours Bengt W

anderssunesson wrote:

I refuse to beleive that this is as good as it gets - commercial DVDs are much better and this is from a €%&/# VHS, so there should not be any real degradation?!?

You encoded the original video 2 times. There will most certainly be degradation.

Can you give us the exact specs for the QT file? Just open in QT Player and hit Cmd+I to bring up the inspector.

Taking a guess here: The Mpeg-4 video probably contains square pixels (DVDs don't do square pixels) and that could be the problem. The other thing is that iMovie versions newer than 6 don't deal well with SD video, as stated before by Bengt.

Here's what you can try:

• when digitizing try to get the output to DV PAL in a .mov container or .dv

• if you need to edit use iMovie HD 6 or FCE or FCP, then export a self-contained QT file.

• if you don't need to edit bring the DV file directly into iDVD

anderssunesson wrote:

When I inspected on a huge flatscreen it turns out that

-all the iDVD movies have TERRIBLE pixellation

Clearly when you look at a 720 x 576 DVD on a 42" LCD it will not look good unless you have good source footage AND a good encoder AND good upscaling from your player. iDVD does provide a good encoder but the other two may just not be up to the task.

I personally made DVDs that looked good on a 42" Sony TV. But they were encoded in Compressor and played on a Blu-Ray player with excellent upscaling.

anderssunesson wrote:

How can I burn the mpeg-4 to a DVD without incurring the loss in quality? How do studios do this?

You can't and they don't. First of, studios don't start out with highly compressed videos and secondly they have much better software encoders (which cost $$$$) like CinemaCraft or hardware encoders.

anderssunesson wrote:

There were some tips on round pixels vs square pixels. I will look into that. Do you need a special "DVD-digitizer" to save your old VHS movies??

You can get something that goes from VHS to DV (instead of MPEG-4) like the Canopus converters and then edit in either iMovie 6 or FCE (both are EOL). In any case, bear in mind that you start out from VHS.

Why is the iDVD-burned CD of worse quality than the raw quicktime movie?

forgot to say ( Most probably already said )

on the DVD there is a (say 1 to 2 hour) highly compressed material in sort of .mpeg2 code

the Raw QT.mov (.dv) (.mov is no codec it's a container and can hold about anything e.g. .dv as is a "near to zero compresses" video-codec - well it is but in a non-destructed way)

on a DVD there might be 4.7GB .mpeg2

in the QT.mov (2 hours) there is 27GB

That's why a DVD never can be as good as Raw .dv video - ever.

Yours Bengt W