[Ed Gallaher]

I want to develop some software short training movies for ultimate transfer to VHS for teaching purposes. I have been using SnapzPro for several years - it allows me to capture the desktop and save it as a QT movie. The result is crystal clear - fonts look original, etc.

I have recently started using iMove 2 (impressive!). According to David Pogue iMovie2 Missing Manual I should be able to export from QT to DV format, and then import into iMovie. I have tried it but the resulting clip in iMove 2 is terrible. The fonts are distorted, at least as bad as trying to watch a computer screen on a standard TV. I then tried exporting from iMovie back to QT and it looked even worse.

I realize the final result should look better when transferred back to the DV tape, and I haven't tried this yet, but I'm not optimistic.

Am I doing something wrong? I tried using several different codecs in SnapzPro to render the captured movie, but this did not seem to help at all.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

TIA,
Ed Gallaher

[lucylawless]

what settings did you use to export from iMovie back to quicktime? None of their preset's are very good, in my opinion...

[T Allen]

If your final output is tape there's no need to compress it. Give this a quick test. Also, what is the reason for taking it over to iMovie?

Regards,

T Allen

[Steve Ritter]

Originally posted by Ed Gallaher:
<STRONG>I want to develop some software short training movies for ultimate transfer to VHS for teaching purposes. I have been using SnapzPro for several years - it allows me to capture the desktop and save it as a QT movie. The result is crystal clear - fonts look original, etc.

I have recently started using iMove 2 (impressive!). According to David Pogue iMovie2 Missing Manual I should be able to export from QT to DV format, and then import into iMovie. I have tried it but the resulting clip in iMove 2 is terrible. The fonts are distorted, at least as bad as trying to watch a computer screen on a standard TV. I then tried exporting from iMovie back to QT and it looked even worse.

I realize the final result should look better when transferred back to the DV tape, and I haven't tried this yet, but I'm not optimistic.

Am I doing something wrong? I tried using several different codecs in SnapzPro to render the captured movie, but this did not seem to help at all.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

TIA,
Ed Gallaher</STRONG>

I asked the same thing a few weeks ago (for basically the same reason, only my target output was quicktime). First, if you play back the DV in quicktime pro, go under options, video track and check the "high quality" box (this is from memory, so the menu items might be different). If you play back with "high quality" checked, the fonts should look undistorted.

This sounds really weird, but the explanation is that "high quality" is really a playback option, not an encoding option. Normally, QT sacrifices quality to maintain framerate. But with screenshots, you probably care more about quality than dropping a few frames.

The story is that iMovie will preserve the full quality of the video, even though, once imported into iMovie, you'll see the "low quality" version (and iMovie has no option to use "high quality" when you play back in it). When you export to tape, all will be OK. I say this is the story because, since I was outputting to QT, I didn't actually try this (and just suffered with bad quality video on the screenshots).

The Missing Manual also seems to imply that you'll get best quality if the Snapz video is 640x480.

Let me know how this works for you. Maybe next time, I'll output to video (or DVD).