Degrades Play Quality From Imovie

[KeithJames]

I burned my first DVD on Toast DVD and I was a little disappointed. It's a 5 minute music video. There are many fade ins and outs with different photos on top of a running film of moving country side filmed from a car window. I'm disappointed with the lack of smoothness in the video and it's not just the faster moving country side, even the opening garage door which smoothly rises in the original video does not rise smoothly in the burned Toast version, showing little hold-ups and then catch ups in the motion. It's subtle, but visible and disappointing and takes away from the quality of the video. I played with custom settings but didn't achieve any improvements. Is this lack of quality built into the product meaning I need a higher quality burner software of are my settings wrong? Thanks for comments.

[tsantee]

There are a couple things you can do to fix this. One is in iMovie and the other is in Toast.

 

In iMovie you need to find where to save the video using the custom QuickTime settings I've posted below. Note that it is set to Progressive even though the video will be interlaced by Toast later on.

 

In Toast go to the Custom Encoder Settings window and raise the average and maximum bit rates (but not to maximum). Turn on Half-Pel. Since this is a music video raise the audio bit rate too.

 

These steps should result in a smooth playing video.

 

[KeithJames]

Hi DG: Thanks for these tips.

 

I couldn't find where these quicktime settings are.

 

I'm in iMovie 10.0.6

 

I looked for this in iMovie and couldn't find any share to Quicktime nor menu for these settings.

 

Then I looked at a desktop copy/clip of the movie which is in quicklime and tried to re-save it to find new settings but this didn't get me there either.

[tsantee]

The option to "share" using QuickTime's custom settings seems to be missing from the newer iMovie. My suggestion is to share from iMovie at whatever is the highest setting that matches the resolution of the source video. This is done via the Share>File option.

 

Download and install the freeware MPEG Streamclip if you don't already have it. Open the video from iMovie in Streamclip. Choose Export to QuickTime... from the File menu. Choose the DVCPRO50 NTSC setting from the Compression popup window. Click Options to choose Progressive and 16:9 (which I presume your video is). Movie the quality slider up near the top. Uncheck the Interlaced Scaling box because I presume your source is not interlaced. Everything else should be okay as default. Click Make Movie.

 

Use this version in Toast.

[KeithJames]

Hi DG:

I appreciate your extra thought on the matter. I'll follow through on this!

[KeithJames]

I found that there were complaints online that MPEG Streamclip was not updated for Yosemite and had problems. But I ended up being able to follow your instructions by importing to my Quicktime Pro 7 and found all the same settings you instructed! Thanks. Though a couple small hitches and a little graininess on a couple of the still photos the smoothness of the video is much improved. I seem to be getting a glimpse that video formats can get quite complicated. Thanks again for your help!