Couple of questions about hi8 footage, importing and burning

[VoodooDaddy]

Have a dozen or so hi8 tapes. I bought a Dazzle DV bridge a while back and it imports just fine through firewire. My questions are:

1) when importing into iMovie, are there any settings I need to check to get the max quality? The movies are imported in dv format, but only at a screen size of 640x480. Is this the max quality?

2) to burn to a dvd, I just opened Toast, dragged the file in, and let it encode there. One I just did today was a 9.7gb file (dv format). After encoding the file size was only about 2.3gb on the disc, leaving about 1.7gb of unused space on the dvd. Is this normal? Just surprised that a 9.7gb file is compressed that much.

3) would it be better to send to iDVD to encode or would it be any different from Toast?

Any other suggestions on getting the most out of these old tapes is welcome too. Thanks.

 

[huntercr]

Have a dozen or so hi8 tapes. I bought a Dazzle DV bridge a while back and it imports just fine through firewire. My questions are:

1) when importing into iMovie, are there any settings I need to check to get the max quality? The movies are imported in dv format, but only at a screen size of 640x480. Is this the max quality?

2) to burn to a dvd, I just opened Toast, dragged the file in, and let it encode there. One I just did today was a 9.7gb file (dv format). After encoding the file size was only about 2.3gb on the disc, leaving about 1.7gb of unused space on the dvd. Is this normal? Just surprised that a 9.7gb file is compressed that much.

3) would it be better to send to iDVD to encode or would it be any different from Toast?

Any other suggestions on getting the most out of these old tapes is welcome too. Thanks.

1) Are you sure it's not just being shown as 640x480? This happens in quicktime. If your video is NTSC, it should be 720x480, AFAIK it's not even possible to have a DV file that is lower resolution.

2) Yes that's normal. That is simply because DV codec is much less compressed than MPEG2 ( DVD )

3) On both programs you can choose your quality settings. I like iDVD's menu's alot, I thin some of them ar really classy for hobby use.

 

[VoodooDaddy]

1) Are you sure it's not just being shown as 640x480? This happens in quicktime. If your video is NTSC, it should be 720x480, AFAIK it's not even possible to have a DV file that is lower resolution.



3) On both programs you can choose your quality settings. I like iDVD's menu's alot, I thin some of them ar really classy for hobby use.

1) looking at inspection it says 720x480, then in parenthesis says 640x480 so I guess its right.

2) I personally dont want any menus, these are just family videos mainly of 1 event (birthday, Christmas, etc). I set toast video quality to best (on scale of good, better, best). Would iDVD give any any noticable quality improvement? Im guessing probably not.

edit - looked at inspector again, at the bottom it says "normal size" and "current size" and both are 640x480.

 

[huntercr]

1) looking at inspection it says 720x480, then in parenthesis says 640x480 so I guess its right.

2) I personally dont want any menus, these are just family videos mainly of 1 event (birthday, Christmas, etc). I set toast video quality to best (on scale of good, better, best). Would iDVD give any any noticable quality improvement? Im guessing probably not.

edit - looked at inspector again, at the bottom it says "normal size" and "current size" and both are 640x480.

1) Right, this is correct. TVs use a different pixel shape than Computer monitors do, so on quicktime it's telling you that it's displaying at 640x480.
( google for "nonsquare pixels" if you want to know more )

2) There is always the "onestep DVD" mode fo iDVD if you don't want menus, but yes, I would imagine that toast and iDVD are of comparable quality. From iDVD 08 on there is also "professional quality" mode, but I've never seen anyone do any indepth analysis on just what is better about this.
Give it a try and see if you like it better.

Also one other thing to note... if you're outputting to a DVD, do *NOT* deinterlace your footage.