iMovie08 exports crappy quality?

[Stike]

Hi folks,

I am going to cut it short: Whatever I try, iMovie 08 does not manage to export a decent quality, except I go the "diy" route and export it with Quicktime with my own settings.

My source is an iSight video. But no matter what I use to export:
- YouTube
- WebGallery (any quality)
- iTunes
- etc.
even
- Quicktime with iPod Videopreset..

it all ends up looking like utter crap:

What can I do to avoid this crappy conversion, except doing it all manually??

 

[Wilson1984]

What resolution are you trying to output? If your trying to do a higher res then you are capturing with your camera, then ya, its going to look poor.

 

[Stike]

Thanks for the reply, but I guess the problem is less trivial than this.

The input video is 640x480 (iSight) and no matter at which resolution I try to export (640, 320, anything) the compressed video will look like the screenshot above!

Its about the used codec or bitrate, I suppose. But I just cant get behind that... iMovie seems to screw up that stuff badly.

Maybe its a collision with some 3rd party codecs? x264? Could it work if I remove those? 😕

 

[puckhead193]

when you play it back does it look like crap? (in imovie)
have yo used your isight prior to this in ichat?

 

[Stike]

when you play it back does it look like crap? (in imovie)
have yo used your isight prior to this in ichat?

No, within iMovie it all looks normal (great). Only after export to whatever format, it looks like the above screenshot (and in motion like that too, yeah!)

No, I barely use iChat. I was not using the iSight camera aside from recording the footage with it (that was some months ago).

 

[stevep]

The iSight camera is definitely not doing you any favours, but having said that I can only agree that exporting from iMovie causes all sorts of quality problems. The preview in iMovie is fine - good quality, no pixelation on text and still photos, and every time I export to dv or highest quality Quicktime I get rubbish.
The good news is that I've just found this site:
http://www.keywebx.com/tutorials/2005_09_08_0001/index.html
with instructions on how to export, and then locate the hidden reference QT movie within the exported iMovie file. I've just tried it with one of my iMovie projects and at long last I think I've found a solution to this quality problem. It is based in iMovie 06, so I'll be interested to know if it works in 08 as well.

 

[Stike]

Hey stevep, thanks a lot for this, I will look into that.

I for my part found the solution to my problem!!

iMovie got screwed up (once more) by other codecs that are/were installed in my Library/Quicktime folder.

I removed the following codecs:
x264Encoder.component
msmpeg4v1.component
msmpeg4v2.component
mp4vEncoder.component
mp4vDecoder.component

I dont know which one was actually causing the trouble, but the bad guy is definitively among those!

Now, the video looks as it should - not a pixelated mess as in the first post!

Thanks everyone for helping me out! 😀 😎

 

[peejer]

Where did you find the codecs? Are they hidden? In what folder?
Thanks,

 

[Stike]

Where did you find the codecs? Are they hidden? In what folder?
Thanks,

I had installed those codecs manually before. They are usually not supplied with the clean install of OS X.
Though, iMovie clearly has issues with some of them.

You can find the codecs in <youruserhomefolder>/Library/Quicktime

If you want to play around with that, you can just take the codecs out of there and move them anywhere you wish. They will be "uninstalled" then.

Just quit and start iMovie again with the codecs removed, and the changes will take effect.