Placing a still image into a story line

You guys may have to start a beginners video section just for me.

Yesterday I was out on a University of Miami shark tagging trip, and shot some video and stills with the D7000. (Good day, tagged a nice 11 foot hammerhead)

Anyway now I am editing, just iMovie '11 for now, seems adequate for my limited movie imagination and more intuitive than FCE.

Anyway I want to bring some stills into the story line and it's easy enough just dragging them from iPhoto or Aperture into the time line. Only problem is that the quality sucks, seem to loose resolution and images are fuzzy. Any ideas on what I am doing wrong and how to fix it.

You guys may have to start a beginners video section just for me.

 

Yesterday I was out on a University of Miami shark tagging trip, and shot some video and stills with the D7000. (Good day, tagged a nice 11 foot hammerhead)

 

Anyway now I am editing, just iMovie '11 for now, seems adequate for my limited movie imagination and more intuitive than FCE.

Anyway I want to bring some stills into the story line and it's easy enough just dragging them from iPhoto or Aperture into the time line. Only problem is that the quality sucks, seem to loose resolution and images are fuzzy. Any ideas on what I am doing wrong and how to fix it.

Have not used iMovie 11 yet. When you say it is loosing quality, where and when? Just on preview on export and playback? Are you scaling the images outside of iMovie and brining them in or using iMovie to scale? What type of images are you bringing in?

In general (broad stroke) you may get better results scaling outside of iMovie then bringing the scaled images in. I have found that iMovie seems to do better than Final Cut in scaling in general, but still try that. Also, not sure if you are using JPGs, which are compressed. I have meant to load up iMovie '11 at some point and will run some tests then.

Like Drew said is the image quality diminishing on export and playback or just in preview while in iMovie? Often things will look different once you export your movie to its final format/resolution.

Cheers, Simon

Is the pixellated stills bug STILL AROUND?!? A few years ago, while I was waiting for my MBP to be fixed at an Apple store, a Genius had to help this girl who had the same issue with iMovie '0x. He was lost and so I jumped in to help. Seems on export, iMovie renders stills into garbage, pixellated ones at that. The down conversion engine just sucked!

Being that FCP also had super long exports to Compressor from inside FCP, we tried exporting via QT export vs direct to iDVD. Bang, much better quality. I'm pretty sure this problem is the progenitor to your problem, Jeff.

Check Apple discussion boards, I'm pretty sure the Genius posted there while we were waiting for the export. This was about 3.5-4 years ago.