When you use FireWire to process your digital video, the quality of your video is totally dependent on the quality of your camcorder. The video in your computer is the same video the camera shot.
Gary Barlow is the head football coach at San Joaquin Delta College, which is a 2 year school. He makes highlight tapes for his players that go on to 4 year schools to help them get scholarships. A head coach from a 4 year school called him to find out how he could get in contact with Gary's video coordinator. It seems, the video coordinator at the 4 year school wasn't producing video that was as good as Gary's. Gary responded "You're talking to my video coordinator, and I use TD Video".
One of our customers used an expensive SVHS (several thousand dollar) camera to film their wide view from the pressbox. They also used an inexpensive digital 8 camera to film their tight view from the endzone. When they checkerboard these two cameras together, the quality difference between wide and tight is minimal, because the digital 8 video is still original quality. The SVHS video has lost some quality because it had to be digitized. They have since replaced the expensive SVHS camera with an inexpensive digital camera.
The QuickTime video shown above was produced by TD Video. The video was recompressed and resized at two thirds of its original resolution so that it will transmit over the web.
OK, so we cheated - the video above was shot with a high definition camcorder. We captured this video with iMovie-7 at 960 x 540, half its original resolution (1920 x 1080), imported it into TD Video and then recompressed it at 640 pixels wide by 360 pixels high. TD Video does a great job playing back 960 x 540 resolution video. It looks great on a standard XGA (1024 x 768) projector. No need to buy new projectors to utilize high definition camcorders.
If you can't display the video shown above, you may need to download the latest version of the QuickTime Player from "www.apple.com/quicktime".