Resolved iMovie 06 export to DV looks bad

I have iMovie 06 and was exporting my movies using both mp4 and h.264 compression and they looked fine. Then I went to burn those to a DVD in iDVD and of course they looked terrible. So I am going back and exporting from iMovie 06 all my movies at full DV quality and am noticing they look worse than the h.264 .mov files despite large bit rates/file sizes.

First I tried DV in .dv containers and they looked jagged like some I have seen on here with interlacing problems. So then I tried DV to .mov container and then the jagged lines went away but now the movies are too soft, blurred in fact. File sizes are about the same as .dv, but lets just say the preview image while editing in iMovie looks better than these exports.

It is odd that it is only DV footage though. Note, the videos look bad in exporting different sources of video. Some is from camera, some from A/V converter, some DVD rips, all look bad. Could something be wrong with iMovie or QT components? I have already reloaded iMovie in the past due to stability issues, which are gone now. If you need photos of clips to compare let me know.

Thanks in advance
Nathan

LethalWolfe said:

So you exported from iMovie at full DV quality, burned that onto a DVD using iDVD then watched it on a TV and it looked bad on the TV?

If you are just looking at the movies on your computer than I'm not surprised they look bad because computers can't natively display interlaced content (especially SD content) correctly.

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No I haven't burned them yet, just watching on the computer. Didn't know about that though, so its safe to burn without making another coaster?

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Dave Braine said:

Standard dvd resolution is only 720 x 576/480, so it's never going to look as good as it does on the computer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD-Video

Although DV is the best quality that you can export from iMovie, what was the resolution of your original footage? Exporting as DV isn't going to improve the original quality, but just give you the best export quality.

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Original footage is all 640x480 except for a few larger and 1 smaller.

I will go ahead and finish off exporting and then burn a DVD and let you know if it's okay or not. I never did it this way before, just always sent one project straight to iDVD and it was always fine.

Ok I burned to DVD and it looked fine.