iMovie, FCE, and video quality

[MattG]

I've been playing around with iMovie and have rendered some pretty good movies out of it, however the quality isn't as high as I'd like. I'm aware that there are two different qualities that iMovie uses, and which one it uses depends on whether or not you've got more than 60 minutes worth of video--you get higher quality with a 60< minute video.

I'm probably going to be doing more video editing in the future, so with my newest Mac I did the $99 Final Cut Express deal. My question is, how much video will I be able to fit on a DVD with FCE? Also, do I still use FCE in conjunction with iDVD, or does FCE have it's own DVD burning program? Basically what I'm trying to do is make a high quality video, hopefully up to 90 minutes each, using whatever combination of software I have to. Any tips?

[arn]

Originally posted by MattG
I've been playing around with iMovie and have rendered some pretty good movies out of it, however the quality isn't as high as I'd like. I'm aware that there are two different qualities that iMovie uses, and which one it uses depends on whether or not you've got more than 60 minutes worth of video--you get higher quality with a 60< minute video.


This is incorrect. You are thinking of iDVD.

iMovie takes DV formatted video and can edit/save. I don't think the quality will be that much different of the raw DV than with other packages.

iDVD takes the DV and converts it into MPEG2. Depending on how much video you have, it has to compress it more or less. (60min vs 90min).

In order to really maximize your DVD quality, you'll need a better MPEG2 encoder. DVD Studio Pro provides variable rate encoding... which should provide better quality. and more efficiency.

There are also 3rd party options too.

arn

[MattG]

Originally posted by arn
This is incorrect. You are thinking of iDVD.

iMovie takes DV formatted video and can edit/save. I don't think the quality will be that much different of the raw DV than with other packages.

iDVD takes the DV and converts it into MPEG2. Depending on how much video you have, it has to compress it more or less. (60min vs 90min).

In order to really maximize your DVD quality, you'll need a better MPEG2 encoder. DVD Studio Pro provides variable rate encoding... which should provide better quality. and more efficiency.

There are also 3rd party options too.

arn

Any suggestions for 3rd party options? DVD Studio Pro is pretty expensive, and from the looks of the interface, is a lot more than I need!