Hi.

I just finished editing a peice and want to burn it on DVD, but I don't have a DVD Burner, so I'm going to sent it to my frend who does.

What should I put the video in? Quicktime? MPEG2?

He's says that he's going to do it in iDVD, so does iDVD support MPEG2 importing?

Thanks.

-VL

An uncompressed Quicktime would be the best and let iMovie do the encoding for DVD. iMovie does not have a very sophisticated import feature and you could run into trouble with bit rate etc. Best to bring in the Qt and let iMovie do it's thing.

He's says that he's going to do it in iDVD, so does iDVD support MPEG2 importing?

I'm curious about this too, does iDVD support MPEG2?

iDVD will import any video ending in .mov I don't think it can import an .m2v file. iDVD creates standard DVD-R discs that support the mpg2 standard.

Hello Van,

Were you successful in burning your movie on your friend's iDVD?

cheers,
Peter

Yeah, I ended up encoding my short film in Sor3, highest quality settings. DVD looked great, far better than VHS.

Hmm...

What did you edit in?

iDVD quite easily caters for all Apple video editing software.

Usually, if you needed to author and burn a DVD on another mac, you would export to a self-contained file.

cheers,
Peter

I've always wondered about these things too.. What IS the best quality setting to create a DVD? I usually make a selfcontained FCP file (best quality) and burn with iDVD. Somebody told me that you get a better result, ecodingwise, with DVD studio pro.
Is this true? (iDVD is kind of idiot proof while DVD studio pro isn't =( How do You do it?

Sorry to piggyback..

Thanks.

Hello Alfred,

A DVD movie is made by compressing your edited movie using mpeg2 compression. The amount of compression can vary depending on the "quality" setting you use in the authoring tool.

iDVD has two settings - best quality and best performance.

To my best knowledge, best performance uses a fixed compression rate or CBR (Constant Bit Rate). Best quality uses a variable compression rate or VBR (Variable Bit Rate).

The variable compression allows iDVD to work out optimal compression depending on how much information is presented in the movie. In other words, there is more compression used for static scenes and less compression for scenes with a lot of motion. Thus, quality of the overall movie is better with this option (obviously, encoding will take longer as it needs to decide the compression rate)

There is no way to control the actual bit rate for either settings in iDVD - hence an easy to use consumer product (or "idiot proof" as you say).

DVDSP on the other hand, allows you to control compression.

cheers,
Peter

I think best quality varies with the length of the program also. I don't remember the specific times, but its on the order of under an hour is a higher bite rate and over an hour is lower bit rate.

Hello Jeff,

It makes sense to use a higher compression for longer movies, but if my memory serves, iDVD forces the user to select "best quality" for movies over an hour, while giving a choice between settings for movies under an hour (I could be wrong here - I've never bothered with Best Performance :)

cheers,
Peter