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How to burn large movies

B

bigbop@mac.com

macrumors member
Original poster
Aug 28, 2006
45
0
After hours of slaving over a hot PC I've finally finished my first IMovie. The problem is, while putting much thought into titles, transitions, the soundtrack and effects etc, I completely overlooked the damned size of the thing. My intention was to make a DVD to play on DVD players and a CD ROM to send to friends and family in Japan. The finished product, however, weighs in at a massive 31 GB. Aggghhhhh! I have no idea how to get the thing onto disc.

Any ideas? Are there ways to compress which I don't know about? your help please.
 
bigbop@mac.com said:
After hours of slaving over a hot PC I've finally finished my first IMovie. The problem is, while putting much thought into titles, transitions, the soundtrack and effects etc, I completely overlooked the damned size of the thing. My intention was to make a DVD to play on DVD players and a CD ROM to send to friends and family in Japan. The finished product, however, weighs in at a massive 31 GB. Aggghhhhh! I have no idea how to get the thing onto disc.

Any ideas? Are there ways to compress which I don't know about? your help please.
Click to expand...
It's not really about the size of the project. The overall time is more important. As long as you're under 2 hours, you should be fine.

iMovie uses DV footage, which is about 13 GB per hour. So you're movie is probably about 2.5 hours long, give or take.

Using iDVD, you would compress your iMovie project to MPEG-2. The problem is that if you're using single-layer DVD-Rs, you may not be able to get all of the movie on a single DVD. If you use dual layer DVDs, you'll be fine.

One solution if you don't have/use dual-layer DVDs would be to compress the movie as a Disk Image (you should always do this anyway, assuming you have enough hard drive space). Then, using Toast, you could further compress the image to fit a standard DVD-R. Sure, it takes longer, and the quality is a little lower, but at least you have the entire movie on one DVD.

Hope this helps.

ft
 
31G? They were able to get the entire Lord of the Rings Trilogy onto three disks!

The file size will compress when converted to MPeg, although there's still no guaranty of fitting on a single disk.
 
bigbop@mac.com said:
Ok. If I use the Quicktime compresser will this do it. Not sure how to convert to MPEG.
Click to expand...
You should do it with iDVD. iDVD will create the DVD structure for you. You will need that if you want your final product to play on a DVD Player.

ft
 
A DVD video is actually a DVD data disc with the proper folder and file types contained within.

thats the "DVD STANDARD"

Think of a DVD you buy at BestBuy as just a CD-R like you burn at home, only they put certain types of files in certain places so that ANY DVD player on the market can play what contained within.

So, with that in mind, you cant just toss video files onto a DVD-R and be done with it. Only a computer could play those videos, as its only a DATA disc with .avis or .movs on it.

you need to convert the video to a format a DVD set top player can use. That is MPEG (either MPG1 or MPEG2).

so, convert your vids to a DVD compatible format.

but then you are stuck with vids that DVD players can play, but you still cant just burn it as is. Because its still a data disc with some video files on it.

You need a DVD authoring program, like DVDSP.

This will take DVD compatible files, like your movie thats been compressed into MPEG2, and create a DVD video for you.

When I say "video" i mean a video disc, it wont make videos like final cut or anything.

So, you need an authoring program to take your video files and stuff and make it into the DVD standard for set top players worldwide.

YOU CAN NOT do this without some sort of authoring program, Toast has one built in, as does iDVD etc.

A DVD that works like a storebought one, needs menus. And if you dont want menus, thats fine, but youll need chapter markers, and all that good stuff.

A DVD is a complicated piece of software and hardware. Youve gotten halfway there by completing the video, now you need to author a DVD.

Use iDVD to keep it simple. Use DVDSP if you want to have more control.
 
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