iMovie Quality

I've used Apple's iMovie for years on countless projects both personal and for business. I've never been terribly impressed with the quality of text and graphics it outputs. For anything too crazy, I'll import a graphic from Photoshop rather than using the limited type effects within iMovie. But even these could suffer on occasion once put on a DVD or exported. iMovie's companion DVD software, iDVD is another program I've used to make my DVD menus over the years. Both programs are not quite "pro level" but work well for their intended audience. Someday maybe I'll get Final Cut Express!

Regardless, the trick I learned to get better text and graphics is to export the movie out of iMovie as a different format than DV or going straight to iDVD. The sample shot above is a clip of the video after I output it to MPEG-4 at a high data rate. This gives MUCH better quality for titles, graphics and even video than my previous methods. I can then go straight to DVD and not worry that someone's going to complain about the text or graphics! I think it has something to do with the "interlaced" nature of iMovie's native format or the way I've exported it in the past. I'm not export at video formats, but this little trick makes it look much better on a computer screen or on DVD.