Keynote > DVD quality awful, please help!

[iMark Nano]

Hi everyone, I'm new to the forums! I'm Mark 23 from Manchester, UK...the problem in hand...


Ok, I've produced an excellent looping movie in Keynote for the Samsung LCD TV in our reception area but when I'm exporting it from Keynote as a .mov then burning it to DVD in Toast, the quality is god awful!! Can anyone help me out with what I need to do to get the 'crisp' quality that the exported .mov is from Keynote? On my Mac screen it looks perfect quality.

It seems the movie file is being down sampled by Toast - how can I prevent this?

Also what document size should I design future movies in Keynote in for the 42" TV?

and one last thing, what file format and settings should I be exporting from Keynote to achieve best results? I'd really appreciate any help in simple terms if possible haha!

Thanks a million,
Mark

 

[Dimwhit]

I'm not sure Keynote is going to give you the quality you want. At its highest export resolution, you're only getting 1024x768. On an 42" HDTV, that's not going to look great. Toast may also be causing part of it, but I think Keynote is the wrong place to start.

You could try using iDVD instead of Toast, but I'm not sure that will do much.

 

[dolphin842]

Keep in mind that any time you make a regular DVD via any method (Toast, iDVD, etc.), you're automatically downsampling to 640x480 resolution. So regardless of your export settings in Keynote, the DVD will always have a rough look to it on a larger TV.

In order to get the better quality, you'll need to find some way of playing that .mov file directly on the TV. Perhaps a cheap, low-power PC with HDMI out can provide the platform for the movie file playback. Of course, if you have a spare computer lying around that might work just as well. Depending on the codec you use (MPEG4 is much better than H.264 for slower systems), you could get away playing the video back on a system with a CPU of under 1GHz.

 

[iMark Nano]

Thanks for your responses guys, at least I know I can't achieve the results I'm looking for when burning to DVD, I can stop pulling my hair out now lol!

I do have an idea actually - stemmed from your laptop idea dolphin. What if I bought a DVD player with a usb socket and DivX compatible. Could I simply convert my .mov to DivX, put it on a USB pen drive, pop it into the DVD player and it'll work?

I've never used a USB dvd player before so I presume you can select any compatible files on it and play direct from a pen drive?

I've seen a few about for only £30 with usb and divx!

Thanks,
Mark

 

[dolphin842]

I'm pretty sure that any DVD player with DivX playback is limited to the same resolution as a DVD. The hardware decoder inside the player probably isn't strong enough to decode a 720p or 1080p file. That said, I've not used one before, so I would ask around to see if there are any players that explicitly allow the decoding of high-def DivX files. If that were the case, I would export from Keynote as a .mov file using the Apple Intermediate Codec (I've done some messing about with Keynote and found that to be the highest-quality export codec), then use something like VisualHub or FFmpegX to transcode it to DivX.

It might be worth checking out a more specialized place like AVSforum to ask something like "What's the cheapest way to push a high-def QuickTime movie to a TV?". They'd be the ones who would know if there are any cheap DVD players that play high-def files, or what some other options might be.

Another option that just occurred to me is to use an Xbox360. It supports H.264 and high-def output, so if you can find a cheap used one, that might be a low-cost alternative as well.

 

[dolphin842]

A quick browse around the AVSforum has yielded this thread. You can use an AppleTV to play back your movie and have it loop (you might need QuickTime Pro to specifically set the movie to loop, though). A refurb AppleTV + QT Pro would end up being ~$230. Hope this helps!