Video Quality And Compression

[babyfett]

New to Mac and new to Toast. Using Toast Titanium. I'm working on a cool animated project and my animation partner sends me the latest animated videos as a quicktime movie file (.mov) and when I've tried to burn a Video DVD the quality looks pretty rotten, even set to "best quality." What am I doing wrong and how can I get a better image? My partner is working in Adobe Premiere on PC and he's exporting the files to me as a Quicktime movie so I'm assuming there's some compression going on there, but the file itself looks fantastic on my new iMac and it's still pretty good when I blow it up to full screen, but when it's on the DVD, it's losing a lot of quality. So I'm first wondering if my animator should try and send me the file in a different format and if so what's better than quicktime and if there's anything I can do in Toast to get a better image quality. Thanks!

[tsantee]

The video DVD won't look good on the Mac unless you are playing it in actual size. Also, note that video DVDs are encoded with interlacing fields which isn't the case with the QuickTime video. Be sure to test the picture quality by watching the DVD on a TV and not on a computer screen.

 

What you can do to improve the quality is click the More button and the Encoder tab and the Custom button. Once you are in the custom encoder window put a check mark next to Half-Pel. You also can increase the average bit rate (presuming this isn't longer than a 2-hour video).