Help! can't burn movie to DVD using Imovie

[steveandkaren]

I've just compiled a 45 min long movie from mini DV using Imovie. Its made up of lots of short clips with audio over the top and is quite large at 25GB in its uncompressed state. I am trying to compress it, so that I can burn to a DVD capacity 4.7Gb.

Can anyone tell me how to compress, I have tried compressing using the default settings and also the expert settings, however got an error message saying that it contained some data which was didn't allow it to be compressed????
Does anyone know how I can fit this onto a DVD (I have to do a presentation on Sunday and don't want to have to take my imac with me!)

 

[gauchogolfer]

Have you tried sending it to iDVD, rather than doing it straight from iMovie? This may eliminate your problem.

 

[steveandkaren]

imovie probs

Yeah, I tried this but it didn't work. It encoded the video, but before it managed to encode the audio, the idvd software stopped responding, so I had to force quit.....

 

[mkaake]

It was still doing it's thing - it's just sort of like that now when encoding, especially when you get to the audio.

Didn't used to be like that...

Anyway, there's two things you can do.

1) start the iDVD process over again. Well really, you're going to have to do this anyway. The least painful way I've found is to set the computer not to sleep or turn on the screensaver while I'm encoding... and then I walk away from the computer. For about 4-5 hours (well, time varies - I'm using a 1ghz g4 emac). When I come back, hopefully it's all said and done.

2) do an intermediate encoding. I started doing this after my last project came out with crappy audio. Anywhere I had transitions in audio inside of iMovie, it crapped out on audio on the DVD. Not cool. Static, hissing, and more shenanigans where there should have been a nice transition. So now, as I said, I do an intermediate encoding. Straight resolution / framerate output, I let iDVD decide how to encode my data the best to fit onto the DVD.

Those two points said, and not knowing how affluent you are with iDVD, there's two things I recommend (if you haven't already done them). In iDVD preferences, make sure that "better" and not "faster" is what you have set for your encoding quality... it does make a large difference how it looks. Second, turn off the Apple watermark. I don't mind it on some home movies, but for presentations, it just needs to go.

Good luck, let us know what happens. And don't be alarmed if it looks like iDVD is hung for about 2 hours when it comes to the final stages of encoding.