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Problem with video quality on made dvd

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I have a 3 year old sony mini dv video camera, and a new I mac,(we are not new to Mac's) Did a new, dvd for a special project last night, we tested the dvd in the new I mac, and it was fine. Getting ready to take my laptop PC with us, and tested it(the dvd) in the PC, and the video was washed/very grainy or not sharp, the photos in the movie were OK. We have also notice on our cheap dvd player the videos are also washed out.
Any suggestions to our problem would be appreciated.
Buying a new video player may be an option but since it will not play well in the pc, but I doubt it would help much but I'm new to making movies/dvd copies.

By the way, how I was able to get the sony camera to import, into the new I mac, I just used a I/O port on one on the daisy chained external hard drives and it worked.
 
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Hmm, have you tried turning the brightness down on the PC and/or TV and see if that makes any changes?

Have you tried capturing a portion of the video on the PC and seeing what the raw footage looks like there? Did you do any form of adjustments to your movie prior to making the DVD (ie: color/brightness/etc)?

I don't know what size iMac you have, but if you have a large iMac, were you playing full screen or were you playing back in the videos native size? On the PC were you playing back full screen or the videos native size?

Did you try exporting in your editor (I assume iMovie?) to a file to play on the PC and compare what the video looks like? How long is your video?

There are some other possibilities, but don't want to say anything without more info...
 
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Looking At it again, on the 21 inch I mac, brand new one, in I movie, sorry, we have final cut express, but have yet to use it, the stills are OK, but the video are of poor quality on the I mac.

I wonder if the camera is starting to fail, or it is the way she had to back door it to get it to get the old camera to load into I movie, as mentioned in original post.
I hate to say it, but maybe I should buy a HD camera and try it or even a newer version of a flash drive video camera and see if it changes the video quality.
I have had good luck with the video function of the Canon still cameras(no complaints), but since I do not do the editing, just the problem solving, I cannot say about the quality of the video for editing.
 
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Did the video pass through iMovie 08 or 09 before being placed into iDVD? If so, then it is Apples fault.
 
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Well I just bought a New Sony HD camera dsc 150 or something like that, my lady insisted, will try it with the new I mac and see what happens. I actually talked to a knowledgeable employee at Best Buy, and guess what he was a Mac user, and was into I movie and Final cut, wow, luck happens once in a while, he may have been actually above me in Mac knowledge, but that wont take much LOL, now PC info might be different.
 
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I'm confused. You bought a digital still camera that also records video?
 
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HD video on DVD - BAD QUALITY!!

Hi,
I am having the same problems it seems.
I have a new sony full HD 1080i camera, I imported all the videos to imovie maintaining the full HD resolution.
I then made the project of the whole video (1h 22m long) and burnt it to a dvd usind iDVD (clicked share > iDVD inside imovie), it then continued by itself by authoring the video and making thet DVD. I put the DVD in my PS3 and watched it, the quality was bad, very grainy and contours were not smooth. If i watch it on my macnook pro it looks very good (HD quality).
How do i get a better image on DVD? is there an option i need to select? The image is very bad!
Thank you!
 
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soulchain, show us an image from the video that is sent to iDVD from iMovie. That should be in the project file inside a 'Movies' folder. You open the project file via a right click to "Show Package Contents".

Remember that iDVD can only burn standard definition video, so your HD material is being converted down to that. Play the DVD on you Mac at native size to see if the quality it better. If you play the DVD onto a HD TV, you are up scaling the image which will cause issues.

To create Blu-Ray discs a version of Toast is needed.
 
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I will post an image ASAP.
In the meanwhile the definition I was looking for is "jagged"! The contours of my images are jagged! I'm not experiencing the coming effect (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/19/Interlaced_video_frame_(car_wheel).jpg), the image quality is not that bad except for the ugly edges on moving images! The camcorder is a sony HDR-CX115, the videos are recorded with the highest possible quality (AVCHD) and copied in imovie maintaining the original quality (http://alasmedia.wikispaces.com/file/view/imovie_import_large.png/48312103/imovie_import_large.png I selected Full 1920x1080).

I also tried to just create the video file (.mov), it came out to be a 6 GB file.

I don't understand how the movies you buy have 2 hours of movie + menus + languages on a DVD and I can't fix 1h and 20m !!

Uhh... I just got a little question... What if I wanted to burn the movie with iDVD to a DL DVD?

I would click Share>iDVD in imovie, and then? How do i tell it to make the movie for a DL DVD?

Thank you again!!
 
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You know, I noticed the same thing. My final DV project, going from iMovie to iDVD then finally onto a DVD, looks terrible compared to projects I do on FCP. I'm curious to find out why.
 
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Investigate the link in my first post in thread.
 
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Did the video pass through iMovie 08 or 09 before being placed into iDVD? If so, then it is Apples fault.

So after reading your link i guess the best thing would be to buy iMovie HD, correct?

I understand there is no way of telling iMovie to share the video in a specific quality with iDVD, it is all automatic.

Correct? :[
 
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Soulchain, finding iMHD may be difficult since Apple no longer sells it. People have resorted to sites like EBay.

I tripped over this suggestion to fix the issue the other day. Actually it seems it fixes more than that. Note that the reference refers to PAL, but the trick wouldn't seem to be limited to PAL.

You can manually export from iMovie using QuickTime export.
 
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I have a 3 year old sony mini dv video camera, and a new I mac,(we are not new to Mac's) Did a new, dvd for a special project last night, we tested the dvd in the new I mac, and it was fine. Getting ready to take my laptop PC with us, and tested it(the dvd) in the PC, and the video was washed/very grainy or not sharp, the photos in the movie were OK. We have also notice on our cheap dvd player the videos are also washed out.
Any suggestions to our problem would be appreciated.
Buying a new video player may be an option but since it will not play well in the pc, but I doubt it would help much but I'm new to making movies/dvd copies.

By the way, how I was able to get the sony camera to import, into the new I mac, I just used a I/O port on one on the daisy chained external hard drives and it worked.

From your description, I had the same thing happen with a similar camera on a XP PC. What I did to fix it was to import it again using Firewire instead of A/V cables. Cleared right up and looked fine after that. On a Mac I have no idea though. My experience had more to do the amount of data that was being transferred and what A/V vs firewire can handle, I think.
 

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