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making a 2 hour long DVD. can iDVD do it or what?

cb911

cb911

macrumors 601
Original poster
hi,

i've just got the Clone Wars episodes and commentaries for each episode and now i want to burn them to a DVD, but i've found out the iDVD will only do a 60 minute DVD with the settings i have it on now, i've also found out that you can set it to do a 90 minute DVD?

but that's still too short. i think the total running time would be about 2 hours, that's for two seasons, not including the commentaries, which would bring it to a total of 4 hours running time (i think). but the actual file size of all that content is only 1.88GB, easily able to fit onto a DVD.

so, how can i get all that onto a DVD with menus so i can play it in a DVD player, or DVD Player.app? if anyone could help me out with this, that would be really great. 🙂
 
What version of iDVD do you use? I think the newest version that comes with iLife '04 is capable of making 2-hour DVDs, but I'm not sure as I don't have it.
 
i've got iDVD 3.0.1. that's the latest, right?

and it would be good if i could get 4 hours of footage in. 😀

i figure that it should be possible some how, because all the files are only 1.88GB, so i just need to make a menu for it somehow so that i can get to the different episodes from a DVD player.

does anyone know any that would meet my needs for this?
 
Hmm, sorry, but the latest version is 4.0.1 AFAIK. So you have to buy iLife '04 or DVD studio pro (perhaps overkill), if you want to do a 2-hour DVD, unless there are some freeware apps that I'm unaware of.
 
ah damn. you're right about it being 4.0.1.

but still, only 2 hours isn't worth it for me... i'd probably be better off getting Director, that does that kind of thing, right? and since i'm getting into motion graphics i guess it'd be good to know Director... hhmmm... might try that out.

also, on a similar subject... i'm just putting together a basic home movie in iMovie, i want to burn it on a CD, 700MB. so i'm thinking of using MPEG-4 audio and video compression, that's pretty good, right? but i need a kind of size calculator so i know what settings to use so i can make it 700MB. any know of an app that can do that?
 
lol. 😀 yeah, some juicy wodges of info, and übergeek and MattG goin at it. 😀

and about that MPEG-4 size calculator... i'm actually after a 3ivx size calculator now. i've got 3ivx, so i'll try that, but i'm just guessing the settings for now trying to get it to as close to 700MB as i can.
 
Alternative to DVD

You can always encode a quicktime and enjoy it on your Mac. With quicktime, you can store several hours of material on a DVD to play on your Mac. Sure it doesn't work on a DVD player but you can still see it in full screen mode with Quicktime Pro. Quicktime is a great inexpensive alternative if you have hundreds of hours that you want to archive. I couldn't afford the time and cost to burn everything I want to archive to DVD. Scrubbing thru video is quicker too and you select the quality vs disk space with the encoding options that makes sense for you.
 
It may only take up 1.88GB (for 4 hours) on the crappy quality you have it in, but DVDs are encoded in MPEG2 which will take up a lot more space (unfortunately you'll still have to put up with the original quality). You may first have to convert the files for iDVD to recognise. You could always burn a data DVD in the Finder of it for computers to play it as a QuickTime file though.

The latest version is 4 but I haven't managed to burn anything right on it yet - it seems very glitchy - even with the latest update patch.
 
yeah, i know that DVDs are encoded in MPEG2, so i'm trying to find a way to keep the unmodified .mov files and just make a front end for them that contains the menu. but i guess that's kind of pointless because i won't be able to play it on a DVD player anyway... 🙄 oh well.
 
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