Re: Editing DVDs
- From: Kadin2048 <Kadin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 29 Jun 2008 17:32:58 -0500
On 2008-06-27, Charles H. Sampson <csampson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[...]
Many thanks for this information. (And to gtr too.) I got MPEG
Streamclip and Quicktime MPEG Playback and have been experimenting with
them whenever I can find a spare moment. I seem to have the basic steps
down, but I've come up with other issues. I haven't been able to create
a file small enough to put onto a DVD. The smallest file I've been able
to create was over 8Gb and the largest was 29Gb, both from about 90
minutes of recording.
The DV video format runs about 36 megabits per second, so somewhere
between 24-29 GB sounds about right for 90 min of material, without
further compression.
IMovie has only one codec, at least only one that Help
acknowledges, called the Sorensen codec. There is no explanation in
Help of the effects of all the possible settings. Is there a reference
somewhere that explains them?
That doesn't sound right. When you export from iMovie, there should
be a choice of several codecs there. (What version of iMovie are you
running?) It's been a while since I've fired it up myself, but my
recollecion is that it ought to have a bunch of presets plus a way to
configure it yourself with whatever codecs you have installed.
This Apple TIL might have information you'll find useful:
<http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=60766>
It says iMovie 6.01 and higher should have five default Export
presets, ranging from "Email Movie" (H.264 160x129, truly pitiful) up
to "Full Quality" which is basically a DV dump encapsulated in a QT
MOV file (36Mb/s). IIRC there should also be a "Custom" setting where you get
the standard QuickTime Export dialog and can pick audio/video codecs
manually.
If the only codec you're seeing is Sorenson, I'd really wonder if
something is hosed about your QT install. That's the only thing I can
imagine would cause that.
What I'm hoping for is a codec that does something like what my DVR
does. It's high-quality mode is the usual: about one hour's worth of
video per DVD. It has other modes that can do up to 8X compression. I
typically keep my number of DVDs down by using the 4X compression.
What you want is probably MPEG-2 or MPEG-4.
If you're just going to play it back on a computer (you don't care
about putting it on a DVD and actually playing it on a set-top DVD
player), I'd either use the "CD-ROM Movie" preset in iMovie (H.264
320x240), or do custom and choose H.264 at 720x480 @ 29.97 FPS (25 FPS
if you're PAL) with AAC audio. That should look acceptable at only a
few megabits/s. You might want to experiment, using a short segment
of video or something.
However, if you want to actually *author* a DVD-Video disc, what you
want to do probably isn't to export and compress the footage using
iMovie, it's to author the DVD using iDVD. It handles designing the
disc's menus and also compressing the content into MPEG-2 (and doing
the audio as well, which is a separate can of worms).
Using iDVD is actually pretty well covered on Apple's site:
<http://www.apple.com/ilife/tutorials/#idvd>
It'll work either "push" from iMovie or "pull" from iDVD; you can
either 'send to iDVD' or you can make a new iDVD project and import
the iMovie project. Either will work.
Then there's the behavior of iMovie while it is exporting. This
time-consuming operation is perfect for being run in the background,
while I'm using the computer for doing other things. That's apparently
not possible. If I put iMovie into the background, by either hiding it
or by putting another window in front of it, it doesn't just render
slowly, it comes close to stopping. Am I doing something wrong? When I
put jobs into the background on the Unix system at work, they chug along
at the same priority as a foreground job.
I'm not an expert on how the Finder deals with background vs
foreground tasks but it's clear just from use that foreground tasks
take a certain priority, background tasks seem to automatically be
"niced" a little. (I've noticed I can speed up Handbrake encodes
slightly by keeping it in the FG, for instance.)
iDVD handles background encoding a little better than iMovie, since
it's really designed to do this. It will actually start to encode all
the "assets" (audio, video, menus, etc.) as you futz around with the
DVD authoring. The encoding process only moves to the foreground if
you start to burn a disc before it's completed.
The only alterntive to iMovie that I'd even consider recommending
would be using Toast to author the DVD ... but even that I'd recommend
with some reservations. Its MPEG-2 encoder is, at least in my
experience, a lot flakier than Apple's. YMMV. I think the way you'd
want to use it would be to export to DV and then drag the DV file onto
Toast, after you've selected that you want a DVD-Video disc (rather
than data). It ought to encode it when you go to burn, assuming you
installed the encoding components when you installed Toast originally.
Unless you have a reason to, I'd go with iDVD over Toast, though.
I'm running OS 14.11 (10.14.11).
I think which version of iMovie you're using is actually the more
important question. (My apologies if it's somewhere upthread and I
missed it.)
My experience dies out with some of the later versions (I switched to
Final Cut), but I used it pretty extensively earlier on. I can't
imagine they've taken out that many of the Export options (certainly,
going back to nothing-but-Sorenson makes no sense -- Sorenson is dead,
MPEG-4 variants are the new hotness), and the Apple TIL above doesn't
seem to indicate anything different in iMovie '08 (version 7.x) from
the 6.x series.
Good luck,
Kadin.
.
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- Re: Editing DVDs
- From: Charles H. Sampson
- Re: Editing DVDs
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