i just purchased an imac and i'm still waiting for final cut studio to arrive but i was playing around with imovie hd and uploading a few things from my camera, and there was so much grain, the picture looked horrible, i even tried a few dvds and there seemed to be a lot of noise in the picture as well. i had the video card upgraded to 128mb too. but i mean the quality on my old pc looks better as of now.

is this just because imovie isn't that great of a program or should it still look half decent? should i be concerned of maybe a hardware issue on the imac?

any help would be appreciated.

thanks

Hi Mitch and welcome to DVinfo! Not sure what "grain" you're seeing. I haven't used iMovie in a long time myself, but I know the preview you see on the computer monitor isn't full quality. I think the only way to judge the image will be on a real video monitor connected to a camera/deck via firewire with FCP. A DVD may not be a good example either since compression creates artifacts of its own.

Certainly the video card has nothing to do with it, and if you captured your video over firewire it's a digital copy of what's on the tape in your camera so there aren't any hardware issues there either.

Moving this thread to the FCP forum since it really doesn't have anything to do with your camera.

Thanks Boyd, Sorry about posting in the wrong section.

I actually tried the advanced Colour Caliboration this morning and my settings were actually way too bright, it solved my problem though. The dvd picture looks a lot smoother now that it isn't so bright.

Thanks again.