Blacks losing definition, camcorder or iMovie?

[Richard200sx]

Hi I have a panasonic SD60 FULL HD camcorder and I am using iMovie to make some videos. I have noticed that when people are wearing black clothes or there are black backgrounds that the blacks are going blocky and losing definition like a badly compressed video.

Is this my camcorder or is iMovie doing something to my video to reduce the quality? The camcorder records in AVCHD and when I put the SD card into the iMac it does take a few minutes to import. I have got it set to import at original size so shouldn't lose any quality.

Anyway if anyone can help on this matter that would be great, do I need to move up to Final Cut etc?


Regards,

Richard

 

[HunterGather]

lol @ the title of this thread.

But to your question, I haven't seen that problem myself (at least with higher end cameras and what not).

Maybe you could test in Final Cut or Premiere (if you have either) to see what happens when you import the footage.

 

[LethalWolfe]

If a black surface is underexposed (be it a shirt or a wall) it will get blocky fairly quickly in my experience. If you play the footage back directly from the camera on a TV how does it look?


Lethal

 

[illegalprelude]

If you are using iMovie 11, then the issue is not your camera but iMovie. This is a well documented problem in the Apple Support forums and unfortunately, there is no good answer.

iMovie has an issue when it imports black content, it can even be still images. You will note that if you find the video via finder, that the original still looks fine but once within iMovie, especially once exported out, blacks lose all quality.

 

[ctakim]

lol @ the title of this thread.

Agreed, I thought we would have to be notifying the NAACP about this issue!

 

[Richard200sx]

If you are using iMovie 11, then the issue is not your camera but iMovie. This is a well documented problem in the Apple Support forums and unfortunately, there is no good answer.

iMovie has an issue when it imports black content, it can even be still images. You will note that if you find the video via finder, that the original still looks fine but once within iMovie, especially once exported out, blacks lose all quality.

Thank you all for the replies, sorry about the thread title... lol

I am using iMovie to import the video's so some of the originals have been deleted now, gutted. I guess I will have to try another piece of software Is there any work around on this at all? I liked iMovie as I was just starting out with editing and obviously it was easy to use.

I know the new final cut is taking a bit of a bashing but would that be worth a look as people are considering it an imovie pro type of program....?

Does FC suffer with black problems?



Cheers,

Richard