How to burn SD dvd using HD video

[Gator24765]

Okay so i used an HD camcorder to record a sports game. I would like to get that footage and burn to dvd. Everything I try is taking sooo long. I have transferred into final cut and everytime I try to export to dvd or compressor it would take like 8 hours or so. Anyway I can do this any faster.


the camera I have is a canon vixia hf20.

 

[pintsizemacman]

make it with idvd in your apps folder

 

[spinnerlys]

If you have Final Cut and Compressor, I assume you have Final Cut Pro, which comes with DVD Studio Pro since 2006 or so.

Use Compressor to transcode the footage t a preset of your liking and DVD Studio Pro to create the DVD.

Transcoding will take some time, especially with long videos and HD.

How long is the finished video and what preset did you choose in Compressor?
Also what Mac do you have?

Btw, iMovie will take the same time to transcode the video.

PS: Your thread title is a bit scrambled. The word "us" does seem to be misplaced and should be replaced with "from" or something similar.
To edit your thread title, just click on the

button on the bottom right of your original post and then click the "Go Advanced" button below your message.

 

[Gator24765]

The final video is 1 hour 30 minutes.

 

[spinnerlys]

The final video is 1 hour 30 minutes.

The last DVD I created via Compressor and DVD Studio Pro took quite some time.
It was an SD sequence with 9 to 15 minutes length and the actual encoding on via Compressor to the "90 minutes, best quality, two passes" setting took around 27 minutes on our Mac Pro with four cores and 2.x GHz.

You have a C2D MBP which is slower, thus eight hours sound fine. I once created a DVD via a 2.8 GHz MBP from a 21 minute sequence and the encoding took more than an hour.

 

[hsilver]

This works - advice I use from Larry Jordan

Try doing this compression in two steps, because the quality of the 120 minute setting is somewhat low. Compressionists call this "Pre-Compression," which means to prep the file into its final format before compressing it. When you need to create multiple compressed versions of the same file, pre-processing can save a lot of time.

After doing a QuickTime export of your sequence choosing "SELF-CONTAINED" in options:
1. Resize your HD movie to SD using Compressor but don't compress it.
* Encode it to ProRes HQ

* In the Frame Controls tab, turn Frame Controls On, set Output Fields to Progressive, Deinterlacing to Better, and turn Adaptive Details Off.

* In the Geometry tab set image size to 853 x 480 using a custom 16:9 aspect ratio
2. See how your movie looks. It WON'T look as good as HD, as the image resolution is seven times smaller. But it should look OK.
3. Then, compress the resized image to MPEG2 using the DVD Best Quality 120 minutes setting.
This two-step process takes a bit longer, but should provide a lot higher quality

Also if you are working on a multicore Mac like a 4 core iMac, go to qmaster preferences in System Preferences and turn them on and then in compressor choose the name you have for your rendering farm or whatever you call it and use that to compress your video. It speeds things enormously

 

[martinX]

Playout from the timeline into a DVD recorder...

I've done that more than once. I also record directly to DVD on occasion. PPT presentations (and sports games, dare I say it) don't suffer greatly from it. The only portable DVD recorder I have found is a Sony, but even that needs 240v.

 

[spinnerlys]

Playout from the timeline into a DVD recorder...

I've done that more than once. I also record directly to DVD on occasion. PPT presentations (and sports games, dare I say it) don't suffer greatly from it. The only portable DVD recorder I have found is a Sony, but even that needs 240v.

But that would require a playout box like the Koona devices, wouldn't it? Unless one would have a DV camera and could record to tape and loop through the camera onto a DVD recorder.

 

[martinX]

But that would require a playout box like the Koona devices, wouldn't it? Unless one would have a DV camera and could record to tape and loop through the camera onto a DVD recorder.

• Kona device, Blackmagic device
• DV Camera via Firewire (as long as it didn't go to sleep when it wasn't recording, as some consumer cams are wont to do)
• DV deck
• laptop with composite out
• Mac with VGA out -> composite converter (like this, but there's a whole range of them according to what connector your Mac has)

 

[gameface]

Playout from the timeline into a DVD recorder...

I've done that more than once. I also record directly to DVD on occasion. PPT presentations (and sports games, dare I say it) don't suffer greatly from it. The only portable DVD recorder I have found is a Sony, but even that needs 240v.

But that would require a playout box like the Koona devices, wouldn't it? Unless one would have a DV camera and could record to tape and loop through the camera onto a DVD recorder.

• Kona device, Blackmagic device
• DV Camera via Firewire (as long as it didn't go to sleep when it wasn't recording, as some consumer cams are wont to do)
• DV deck
• laptop with composite out
• Mac with VGA out -> composite converter (like this, but there's a whole range of them according to what connector your Mac has)

Not useful if you want a menu. We did this for viewing DVDs back in the day but our recorder still put a generic menu there that you had to click and it looked very unprofessional. It would be more ideal for this scenario to have the disk auto-play but that depends on the DVD recorder specs. And the quality isn't as high doing it this way either.

Answer to the OPs question. Software only is going to take a long time. Deal with it, it is what it is. Machines now are fast though and you don't know how lucky you are. Think how awesome it was for me learning to do this and software encoding files that size on a 533Mhz G4.