[da_jonesy]

OK folks here is the problem...

I have a video stream that I captured from the desktop of a PC (so the video stream is 1024x768 millions of colours, 38 minutes saved as an AVI file using MPEG-2 compression).

I need to get this file into Final Cut Express or iMovie at 720x480 (NTCS) without any appreciable image degradation.

I have been trying to export this movie from Quicktime Pro using JPEG compression but am unable to open it wither Final Cut Express or iMovie. I used the JPEG compression for export as it seems to do a batter job of antialiasing the image stream than MPEG-2 or DV.

Any hints?

 

[live4ever]

Look into using ffmpegx you can resize the video and encode it into a variety of different formats.

http://homepage.mac.com/major4/

I'm not an expert with it (only tried it a few times) but it seems to be a pretty powerful encoder.

Try posting in the forum if you need help, major is great at suggestions and timely responses.

http://www.dvdrhelp.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=35

 

[Jason47]

ffmpegx seems designed for converting dvds to vcds. I've never been able to preserve decent picture quality with that program. Cleaner is a pain too, slow and by the time it's finished encoding a few days later, motion is jerky and I have trash the whole thing and start over.

I noticed that the latest version of Quicktime can now handle avi files (about time!). Provided it's a format Quicktime will recognize, export it as a digital stream (should default to .dv
at the end of the file name). This dv format can be imported into Final Cut or iMovie.

Just so you know, the dv file will be HUGE so have lots of disc space.

 

[da_jonesy]

Yeah I tried that... I get a 7.7gig (wow) .DV file, but the problem is that iMovie won't open that file (file too large error) and Final Cut Express will open it, but the image quality is seriously degraded to the point I can't use it.

 

[Glipt]

Try exporting as DV-DVCPRO50. File will be twice as big but compression is less and artifacts are less. Or export with no compression. File will be 5 times as big but have no artfacts. This will not be watchable on a normal hard drive due to the extreme data rate (100 Megs/sec) but Final cut will work with uncompressed video and render a watchable copy to work with. Keep in mind too what you see while working in Final cut is not the finished product so if you notice a lot of degradation, it will not show in the final export from Final cut. It may be your DV file will look fine on export from Final cut. I have worked with uncompressed video of computer animations from Lightwave. iMovie transcodes and "imports" as DV codec only so I notced artifacts from that even upon export. In Final cut, it had to render to watch it in the canvas and it looked horrible but upon export with no compression there was no degredation at all from the original source.

If the content of your AVI is film sourced it may have a frame rate of 24 fps. In this case iMovie will not work at all (it will just double every 4th frame and this looks horrible). And you will need Final cut 4, or earlier versions of Final cut with Cinema Tools installed.

Hope this helps.