I received an email from the friend that is doing the editing, and he forwarded to a post he made at a forum in the hopes of gaining further help. I am going to quote it below in the hopes that someone here might have some additional feedback:
Quote:
I've recently switched from PC to Mac (January '08), and I'm getting into video editing using iMovie. A few friends and I recently filmed a short video (approx. 2:30 long) using my Panasonic MINI-DV camcorder (model no. PV-GS320). When I import the footage into iMovie HD 6.0.4 via firewire, the quality looks great. However, when I try to save my edited project as a .dv or .mov file type on my hard disk, the quality decreases noticeably.
Without having side-by-side pictures to show the difference, the best 2 examples I can give are:
1. Certain "edges" (such as the shoulder portion of a person's T-shirt) looks jagged, not smooth as it did before we saved it as a movie file to the hard disk.
2. At one point in our video, a car drove by. Rather than a "motion blur" look I had in iMovie, the saved file looks more like "lines" driving by quickly.
I am shooting the project in 16:9 widescreen and my project in iMovie matches that same ratio. I use the "Full Quality" setting when exporting. The resulting file is 514 MB (for the aforementioned 2:30 video), so I can't imagine where the quality loss is coming into play. I've also tried "Expert Settings" but haven't been able to find a solution by modifying those.
The same footage shot and imported into iMovie '08 looks perfect when I save it was a QuickTime .mov file. Unfortunately I can't do the editing I need to do in iMovie '08, which is why I'm using iMovie HD. I've also tried doing my editing in HD and transferring that to '08 before saving, but I lose audio that way. Does anyone have any ideas of how I can solve this using only iMovie HD so I don't have to bother with '08?
Sorry for the lengthy post. Wanted to be thorough and detailed.
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In regards to the programs mentioned in previous replies here, it seems they are quite pricey, and likely not realistically affordable for us at this point. Thus, it would be nice if there could be a more affordable solution, but even some additional thoughts or feedback in regards to the new information I posted would be appreciated.