[morps]

Working off of a PowerBook G3, I hooked up a S Video cable to the laptop, connected it to a Sony Mini DV camera and recorded myself doing a product demo. Source captured great onto the camera... full screen and everything.

I then imported the DV footage into iMovie for creating a QuickTime file.

So, here's the problem: No matter what I do (settings) in iMovie, the resulting video comes out all blurry. The best I can describe is that it looks as though it was not captured at the proper resolution. But the source looks fine.

Any ideas? Is this an iMovie issue? Is there another way to create the .mov file (without chumping out of Final Cut or Premiere)?

Thanks in advance...

[opallaser]

This is an interesting question. As always i recommend posting this question on 2-POP.

Have you checked the captured footage on a tv monitor to make sure that everything is fine ? My guess would be that the resolution being projected from the powerbook is higher than standard NTSC image size and imovie is squishing it in and thus making everything look blurry. Although your DV camera would only capture to a standard DV frame size so if that looks good then i don't know.

I can guarantee that someone on 2-pop will know.

[C.J. Moof]

I too recently needed to make a video of some product training. At first, I did the same thing you did, and didn't like the results either.

Instead of taping to DV, I ended up using Snapz Pro from Ambrosia www.ambrosiasw.com, and it worked great. I captured an 800x600 window and room audio through a plaintalk mic, for 2 hours. With Grapics codec for video and Qualcomm Purevoice for audio, the videos came out to about 150 megs/hr!

The only issues I had with it is that it doesn't support USB audio (thanks for removing audio in on the current Macs, Apple! Some of us use that!), and I did start to get a a/v synch issue, which is easily fixed:
Open your finished movie in Quicktime Player- but you need QT Pro for this. Extract the Audio and Video to separate movies (Edit:Extract tracks). Go to the video track, select all, copy. Go to the Audio, and Add scaled- this forces the video to conform to the length of the audio track. Save As, and enjoy a better, tho possibly not perfect, synch.

[morps]

CJ,

I took your suggestion and it seems to have done the trick! Thanks. I ended up needing to capture the audio to another device as it seems that everytime I made a network request (e.g.--go to a url) during my SnapzPro session, the audio would skip.

So, I captured the audio to my DV video camera, extracted it using iMovie, then (as you suggested) pasted it into the source QT video from SnapzPro as a scaled file. Works great.

Thanks again...

Mike