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iDVD and iMovie blues

I

Invizzible

macrumors regular
Original poster
Feb 9, 2003
223
1
I'm wondering if anyone else is having the same problems I'm having with iDVD and iMovie, and if they've found fixes for them.

There are 2 problems with iDVD. The first is after making a 4 minute video in After Effects and editing it in FCP, I exported it as an uncompressed Quicktime and imported into iMovie so I could then burn it with iDVD. The result was a DVD with motion that was not totally smooth. Not extremely jerky, but noticeable. So for comparison, I then took that exact same uncompressed Quicktime and burned the DVD in Toast instead of using the iMovie/iDVD route. The DVD turned out perfect, with totally smooth fluid motion.

The second problem I've had with iDVD is when burning DVD's of my band's gigs. These videos are anywhere from 1 hr. long to 1 1/2 hrs. They are shot on a Sony digital camcorder (don't know which model because it's not mine) and imported via firewire to iMovie. In iMovie, everything's fine but by the time it gets to DVD, the audio and video gradually slip out of sync with each other, and this gets progressively worse as you get farther into the video. When you're 45 minutes in, it's a fraction of a second off and very noticeable when you see a musical performance (drumsticks not hitting the drums at the same time you're hearing them, etc...).

The iMovie problem is that when I try to export a large movie to an uncompressed Quicktime (using "Expert" settings), it always fails and gives me a compression error message. I was hoping to export my gig videos into one big file instead of several clips, and then burn them to DVD in Toast, hopefully avoiding the sync problems of iDVD. But since I can't export these movies, I don't know how I can combine the clips into one file.

I'm using Panther 10.3.6, iMovie 4.0.1, iDVD 4.0.1, FCP 4 and After Effects 5.5, all on a G4 Powermac 1.4 Ghz single proc. with 1 GB ram.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
 
I don't know if this will help or not, but if you have a quicktime movie from FCP, you don't need to go through iMovie to get it into iDVD. Launch iDVD and import the quicktime file. Perhaps by bypassing iMovie you can get the smooth motion you're looking for or at least eliminate one variable in determining the source of your problems.

-Drew
 
The out of sync audio happened to me too, but I found that if you extract the audio from the clips it works fine.
 
Invizzible said:
The second problem I've had with iDVD is when burning DVD's of my band's gigs. These videos are anywhere from 1 hr. long to 1 1/2 hrs. They are shot on a Sony digital camcorder (don't know which model because it's not mine) and imported via firewire to iMovie. In iMovie, everything's fine but by the time it gets to DVD, the audio and video gradually slip out of sync with each other, and this gets progressively worse as you get farther into the video. When you're 45 minutes in, it's a fraction of a second off and very noticeable when you see a musical performance (drumsticks not hitting the drums at the same time you're hearing them, etc...).
Click to expand...

Theres a bug with iMovie/iDVD that requires you to record your sound on the camera at 16 bit not 12 bit, else you get slippage.
 
Thanks all of you very much for the info. I just tried importing the Quicktime file directly into iDVD [didn't even know that was an option] and it did solve the jerky motion problem that apparently was caused by iMovie. This was a short 4 minute video, so the sync issue doesn't apply here.

Tonight, I'm gonna try extracting the audio from one of my long gig videos and then let iDVD burn a disc overnight and tomorrow I'll see if that solves my slippage problem. I certainly hope so. It's very important to me to be able to have good video's of my gigs, and out of sync video is about the worst quality issue I can think of.

Now I'd like to vent a bit about this. Isn't it kinda lame that Apple is trying to be the digital hub leader, and profess the greatness of iLife, when they allow something like this to go on? I mean, I know most people don't notice this problem when making 10 minute videos of little Suzie's kindergarten graduation, but to those of us who are bothered by it, it's pretty bad. I've shown my DVD's to Windows users who were laughing that I made out of sync videos of my band on my Mac. This isn't the way for Apple to win over switchers. I have also written bug reports about that problem to Apple since iDVD v 2.0, and it's still not fixed. If this were a cosmetic or user preference issue, I could understand ignoring it. But it's something that is actually broken.

Ok. I'm done. Thanks again for the help. It's gonna be great to finally have watchable videos!
 
I had not seen that site, so thanks for clueing me in about it. Also to update everyone, last night I extracted the audio in iMovie on one of my 1 hour gig videos, as suggested by Chubypig, before moving on to iDVD. It worked!!! The DVD's audio and video are perfectly sync'ed all the way to the end of the disc. Damn! Finally!! After countless wasted hours and dollars trying to archive my gigs and ending up with useless out of sync recordings, I finally am able to use my stuff and get good results. Thanks everyone!!

You'd think since the work around already exists within the application itself, it wouldn't be a big deal for Apple to fix the problem. Sheesh.
 
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