pixeled... wtf?
 

Ok, so i shot with xl1s, imported, edited, exported quicktime 48 ntsc and burned a dvd with idvd. some of the footage is picelated, and some is glitchy. anyone know anything? thanks!

If using Final Cut Pro, make sure you are exporting as "QuickTime Movie" NOT Using "QuickTime Conversion".

If using Final Cut Express, export as "Self Contained Movie" with audio and video, not a reference movie.

In iDVD preferences make sure you have priority for High Quality selected rather than Priority for Speed (Not sure if it's worded that way though). That is the only way to change the bit rate in iDVD.

Open your iDVD project and see how it looks in test mode. Is it pixelated there? Is the whole thing pixelated, or just in some places? What were all of your settings when you did Quicktime export?

Generally, you can just export your FCP movie, not do QT, and just drop that FCP movie file into iDVD and let it do its thing... There's a good chance if you did a QT export you missed a setting so it ended up being compressed with some codec, and then when you put it into iDVD it got more compressed when it did the MPEG2 conversion...

Mark is correct. In FCP, as opposed to FCE, the export choice for a self containe FCP move is labled "QuickTime Movie" or maybe just "QuickTime". There is another choice labled "Use QuickTime Conversion" or something to that extent. That is what you DO NOT want to use.

i exported as a quicktime 48k ntsc. it DOES have the same problems when played in quicktime. another thing to mention is that even the text overlay at the first looks SUPER pixelated. WHY??

Open the clip in QT and do Apple-I or from the menus Window->Show Movie Info. That will tell you how your file was encoded when you expand the window. Check that to make sure the settings are correct and post them here.

Full-sized DV can look a little soft in QT too, go to Apple-J or menus Movie->Get Movie Properties. In the top left drop-down select Video Track, then the top right drop-down select Quality. Check the High Quality Enabled box and see if your clip looks better then...

> another thing to mention is that even the text
> overlay at the first looks SUPER pixelated. WHY??

It's a legacy "feature" of QuickTime, that DV is shown in some kind of draft mode by default on the desktop. As Mark says, you can enable QuickTime to render high quality DV in real time, since most modern PCs and Macs have enough horsepower to do it without hickups. I believe something similar can happen with AVI files that contain DV and are shown in the Windows Media context.

On my old Powerbook G3, setting QuickTime DV to high quality playback would cause frames to be skipped. My PBG4 shows DV in full screen or at native size with no problem. I can even use QuictIme player to set the movie's display size to 720x540 (4:3) or 854x480 (16:9) to comensate for NTSC DV's non-square pixel aspect ratio and it can still be played on the desktop in full quality.