[Ed Gallaher]

I posted a message several days ago about capturing Mac window with SnapzPro and then sending the QT movie to iMovie. I'd like to simplify my question.

My immediate goal is to get the CLEAREST POSSIBLE software tutorial onto VHS tape for use in the classroom. I will probably want to go to CD or DVD later, but for now I'd like DV or VHS.

I prefer to do this from within iMovie (if it can work) so that I can provide a classroom lecture, Q&A with students, etc. using the standard iMovie feature set.

(Digression - If anyone has other suggestions as to how to do this I'd be happy to hear them. TV renditions via filming the screen usually flicker and roll, although at times I see TV shows where this is not the case. Is this accomplished by synching the (expensive?) video camera to match the computer screen? Other times I'll see a close-up of a computer screen with no flicker or roll - perhaps captured from the screen and exported to the movie. How day do dat? COMMENTS?)

When I do the SnapzPro capture I render with the Apple Animation codec. The result in QT appears to be -perfect-! However, when I export from QT to iMovie there are no options - - just export to DV. The results in iMovie look -terrible-.

As another test I took a good quality QT from iMovie (pot.mov -- from the iMovie website - the "mystery" of who broke the pot on the back deck -was it the dog? the baby? the kid on the tricycle? . . . ) and exported it into iMovie.

It also looked terrible! Fonts in titles were bad, and image was very pixelated.

I don't currently have a DV camera to test exporting back from iMovie to DV tape or VHS tape, so I'd like to postpone this issue until later. (As a partial test I exported back to QT and it looked still worse . . .)

So, in the absence of a camera to test the entire process - Is this what I should be expecting for the typical QT -> iMovie export?

If you tell me it will look terrible in iMovie, and then be OK when transferred back to tape, I'll (begrudgingly) live with it. But it sure seems like there should be a better interface between two major Apple multimedia products?!

Thanks for your previous comments and any further suggestions.

Ed

[lucylawless]

how are you planning to put this on VHS? You can ask about how it will look, but nobody is going to give you a better answer than you can give yourself. take your sample movie and export to VHS, and look at it.

As it turns out, the format of DV is a tricky beast. Neither iMovie nor Quicktime can actually manage to display it at full quality AND framerate. So it WILL in fact look slightly better when exported back to tape. On the other hand, DV is lossy (as opposed to the Animation codec, which is lossless), so it is not a very good choice for showing the small text common in computer applications. In the same vein, if you put a computer display on a TV screen, it's going to look pretty blurry anyway.

for your purpose, I would recommend you capture with Snapz Pro at a resolution of 320x240 (follow the cursor around the screen). Then you can edit your movie in Quicktime Pro, with cut and paste (iMovie can't really do much more than that anyway, can it?). To make fine cuts in Quicktime pro, I use the left and right arrow keys to move frame by frame, and then apple-B (edit->select none) to zero the selection on were the cursor is.

printing to VHS is up to you, you might have to export to DV to use iMovie, or if you have access to a power/ibook, or other computer that can display on a tv, you can bypass iMovie and the whole DV mess, by displaying the quicktime movie at full screen and just recording that with a VCR. Then, when you're ready to save the whole thing digitally, it will be easy to export to VCD with Toast's VCD export plugin.

Now, when you tried exporting from iMovie to Quicktime, I'm guessing you used one of the default settings, which use either the h.263 or DV codecs, which both suck for quality. I don't know why they chose these, but you can choose a better one if you click the various expert buttons....