I have a video that was created on a surveillance camera with the (for video) unsusual resolution of 1280x1024. It's encoded with H.264 and encapsulated in an MP4 AVC container. The quality is rather good, especially considering the difficult structures in the image (the fine steel structure of a radio telescope dish and dark branches against the sky).
I tried to cut it using iMovie, but all export methods I tried so far yield very bad quality videos. The comparison below shows the original footage (left) and the best result I achieved until now (right). This was created by using the built-in exporter and specifying a "large" video. Note the greatly decreased resolution and blurred structures.
There are many hints on the net that suggest using QuickTime export, but I was not yet able to get any better quality out of it. I tested:
- DV output format -- blurry, and the aspect format changed even though I specified an output video size of 1280x1024
- H.264 output -- extremely blurry, even on highest quality setting and with two-pass encoding
So my question is: How can I tell iMovie to simply cut the input video without re-encoding it, or alternatively: How do I tell iMovies built-in exporter to use a different video format than "large" (720x576)?
File size is not an issue here.