[HarryHWombat]

Hi,

I've searched the forum but have not been able to find any similar problems. When writing a completed movie back out to the digi video camera, iMovie seems to crop the output - essentially a black frame around the video. So what I see in iMovide is not what I get on tape.

I use a PAL Panasonic video camera which has been "altered" to allow DV-in. All I can think of is that in some way iMovie is assuming an NTSC output resolution even though it is clearly outputing PAL.

Assitionally - the slow-mo feature does not seem to render all that well - this may be that the first time I tried to write the video iMovie waited while it rendered the slow-mo - I stopped this and started again but this time no render was done.

Anyway - any help would be much appreciated.

:bM

Firstly, what you see onscreen in iMovie includes the overscan that will be lost off the edges of the screen when transferred back to VT. You will always loose something from around the edges, although this "black border" sounds a bit odd.

The other things is that Panasonic DV PAL camcorders sample the DV the same as US NTSC Cams do, that is 4:1:1, but ALL other PAL brands sample 4:2:0 (Although it's not really zero, it's to do with sampling on alternate lines). This may present a problem to the camera expecting something slightly different. I doubt it, though.

Stay Frosty. I'll look into this one. Can you provide a better description of the problem ie: When transferred back to DV tape and viewed on a normal TV or monitor, what do you see? The whole image shrunk within a black border? The image cropped and masked with a black border?

[jwardell]

Yes, you need to compare video to video because of overscan. You will always see more on computer. Final cut even lets you turn on a title-safe indicator so you have an idea of overscan. FCP will also look better for slow-mo because it has frame blending...probably why iMovie's slow mo doesn't look so great.

[HarryHWombat]

Thx guys - it looks like this oversampling may be the issue. My description of the black border may have been misleading.

WRT to titles as mentioned, a title that almost width ways fills the frame in iMovie will get cropped when output back to the Panasonic.

What I should do, I guess, is check the original DV footage thru the Panasonic and then check it in iMovie to see if I see more information.

Thx again,

HhW