[ibookuser2]

I spent about an hour preparing and rendering some 3d animated text which I saved as a quicktime movie. I was surprised to find that iMovie 2 does not import quicktime files. So, no problem. I went into qt player and exported the file as a DV stream. However, the quality of the DV file was terrible! It became so blurred and pixelated that it was no longer readable. I know DV supports much better resoloution, whats wrong? Final Cut does the exact same thing...

Each DV frame is a JPEG compressed still frame, so rendered graphics and text will not retain the sharp edges as the originals. Some DV codecs allow setting of a quality level for the compression, but I haven't done systemmatic testing of the effect of that control on text.

By default, DV plays back at a "low quality" setting in the Quicktime player. This is done in order to avoid dropped frames during playback.

To enable "high quality" mode, open your QT player and choose get info from the top menu. Then choose video from the new window that opens. Check the "high quality" box.

Your image quality should be much better, though you may not be able to play your sequence at 30fps.

You still may notice some motion artifacts due to quality limitations in QT 4's DV codec. Early reports are that QT 5 solves most of these problems. See www.2-pop.com for more details.

[ussfolsom]

The video always looks better once transferred and viewed on a TV. It should look at least a little bit sharper once on the TV monitor, and it may even be a large improvement.

[ibookuser2]

Thank you! My text is once again readable. I installed QT5, too.
much better!