Getting a good video from MiniDV? Is it even possible?

Don't judge a DVD on your computer – whether it's a Mac or PC (unless you have a broadcast monitor). Judge its quality by playing from your DVD player to your TV.

Russ

That's odd.

You mentioned "native codec" and "mini DV's". What codec would that be and are you referring to mini dvd tape? If so, did you capture from a Fire wire connected camera or didyou bring the file into FCP by some other means?

Russ

This has nothing to go with Windows or Mac. But lets not guess about this. Why don't you open the file in the QT player, set it to normal size, and post a screen shot of what you're talking about.

Oh BTW iMovie doesn't have this problem either for the same reason Windows Moviemaker doesn't, it tosses out one field and gives you half the frame resolution.

What DVDs? Hollywood DVDs? They're not interlaced. They're shot on film in very high resolution and authored in a progressive file, none of which DV is.

Ste the Viewer in FCP to show both fields. Upper right corner.

The reason I asked was to learn whether the file had been captured to another machine (say, a PC) by other software and then brought into your Mac in a container other than Quick Time.

Usually the only issue FCP users sometimes have with tape-based files is getting them to import. Once they're in, they should work fine together. And the image quality should not be degraded at all within FCP.

However, compressing to MPEG2 sometimes produces images that are unsatisfactory – just the nature of severe compression – regardless of the software (or platform).

Most players and TVs de-interlace if needed and as a general matter, you're right in not de-interlacing. Otherwise, a lot of important detail is being thrown out prematurely.

But for whatever reason, some disks just don't play well with a given player and there is no choice but to do it before the encoding. FCP can do this, although Compressor can do it better.

Russ

Where is this from and how did it get into your computer? That's not normal interlacing. It's been scaled somewhere in the process.

What model camera and/or deck?

Russ