Quicktime format help...

Hey,

Can someone help me understand some things about DV. Sometimes my DV clips are huge (ie. 50mb/s) while other times they are (30mb/s). They are all 640x480, so I'm not sure why sometimes they have big data rates and other times it's "normal". I thought DV was always 3.5MB/s, so why do I get 50mb/s sometimes?

Thanks!

killr_b said:

Naw, 50MB/ sec? That won't even play back from one drive.

The only variables you can get are the difference between embedded audio or absent audio, and 29.97 frames or 23.98 frames. Maybe not even the audio one.

Where are you looking?

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50mb/s not MB.

It's weird. Sometimes when I go to movie info in Quicktime, it says like 50mb/s and the file size BUT when I go to the info of the file from the finder, it says the file size is half of what it says in quicktime. Like this image...
but in Finder, it says a different file size for the video.

If it was a minor thing I wouldn't really care, but when I use the video in some programs it plays weird.

I'm not sure exactly when this happens. This file that I used as an example was from an HDD camcorder. I used MPEG streamclip to convert it to DV.

It's very weird. I know it's not just my computer cause I've created the same thing on other Macbooks.

Not only is this weird...but there's also a quality loss when I use some videos. By quality loss, it's as if the "high quality" setting in Quicktime is disabled. I don't know why it does that either.

Here's a test clip I made (for a church) in Motion.

This is an image when the clip is in the "media" pane in iMovie.

This is what happens to the image the moment that I drag the clip onto the timeline.

I don't understand why there is a quality loss for no reason.

killr_b said:

That there is normal. It's what happens to text in DV. Sucky, I know. Usually if I'm doing text I put my DV footage into a 10 bit sequence in FCP. When rendered the text stays smooth, but it takes a whole crap load of extra room if you want a stand alone 10 bit movie. But if exported straight to mpeg2 then you keep the smooth text. This is my standard solution.

Click to expand...

But I've created DV movies (using FCP) that have had super clear text so how is this different?

killr_b said:

Well, I don't know. I've been doing it the same for so long… I don't even try anymore?

Out of curiosity, why aren't you using FCP now?

Click to expand...

Haha..I don't know. Sometimes just throwing it in iMovie for simple things is faster.

With the first problem, even if I import the video to FCP, then I export it as a DV, it still has this weird data rate. And it doesn't play correctly. :/