Hi folks.
Please forgive the long (and wide) and rambling post, but something that has been bugging me for a while with iLife is the apparent lack of refinement in iMovie's compressors. Please check out this screenshot:
Now, as this screenshot is in jpeg format, there is already some pixilation occurring. I assume, however, that you can still see a difference in the level of pixilation resident within the four different frame of video that are in this shot. The four frames are as follows:
Top-right: iMovie's "Reflection - Black" animated theme preview. This is as it appears in iMovie's preview pane -- "first gen, high-res" -- and the "light stage" gradient appears clean and smooth.
Top-left: the result of exporting a movie of mine out of iMovie, using Quicktime's "Full Quality" setting from iMovie's Share menu. This clip's compression specs are as follows: 16-bit Integer (Little Endian), Apple Photo - JPEG, 640 x 480, Millions, data rate: 12.71 mbits/sec.
Bottom-right: a light-stage or light gradient given to me by an animator. It is meant to replicate iMovie's "Reflection - Black" look. This clip's compression specs are as follows: Apple Animation, 720 x 486 (648 x 486), Millions, date rate is 133.32 mbits/sec.
There's a big difference in data rate, and I will experiment with the Quicktime export parameters to see if I can improve them. BUT, here is where things get scary:
Bottom-left: the animator's higher resolution clip I referenced above
after being exported into iMovie! As you can clearly see, iMovie has introduced artifacts within the light stage gradient. Also, note that the original frame size from the animator is 720 x 486. I opened the package contents of the iMovie project and then opened the imported version of the animator's clip in QuickTime Player... and iMovie down-res'd the file to DV, 720 x 480 (640 x 480), Millions, DV, data rate 57.53 mbits/sec.
SO, after all of this, I'm wondering if there are any ways to increase the resolution within iMovie? Would having my animator re-render the animation to iMovie's EXACT specifications help?? I also tried dropping a copy of the animator's original file into the iMovie project's Media folder, as I have done in the past with files that were previously outputted from a different iMovie project and therefore the same exact iMovie specs. When you do this and then open that iMovie project, the wayward file gets put into the iMovie project's trash and you can just drag it out of the trash and into iMovie's clips pane and off ya go. As the animator's clip was different from iMovie's "native resolution" (not only was the clip higher in resolution, but also was a .mov file and not a .DV file or 'DV stream" format), iMovie did show this file in its Trash, but I could not drag it into the clips pane.
Any help to get iMovie looking as good as possible would be most welcome!
Thank you.
Jan 30th, 2007, 12:10 PM
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