poor play quility on mac
 

I have poor picture quality when I play HD footage on imac using imovie.
looks fine when played back on tv.

When you capture in iMovie, you first need to select the full HD settings 1920x1080 to get an optimal result. Maybe this was the reason?

I think it's because the A1 shoots video at 1440x1080, and then when you import into iMovie, it stretches it to 1920x1200.

All HDV cameras shoot 1440*1080 and stretch to 1920*1080 for viewing, it is the HDV standard. Surprice: practically all pro ENG type HDTV cameras also shoot only 1440*1080. So that is not the reason. Possibly the capturing is done low-rez.

No system does vertical stretching, it stays at 1080. Possibly a typo above.

It could be the monitor and display adapter too. I had problems until I upgraded my display adapter.

I checked out using iMovie for monitoring (works better than FCP). It looks great. It's got to be a setting that's wrong if he's having problems.