iDVD Help (16:9 widescreen)

[BulkHedd]

I have a DV camera that shoots in 16:9 widescreen (a Canon Elura 100). Today I filmed some of my nephew's basketball game and want to burn a DVD of it for my brother. When I imported the video into iMovie it started doing the "Letterboxing" thing. I did some searching and found out how to prevent that (by saving the video and closing iMovie before disconnecting the camera). So when I open a new iDVD project and add the video from iMovie it burns it vertically stretched so it looks wrong and it isn't widescreen! When I created the iDVD project I made sure it was set to 16:9 widescreen.

What can I do?

 

[MisterMe]

Have you ever played a 16:9 movie on DVD? They are horizontally squeezed, or vertically stretched as you would say. There is a button on a widescreen TV's remote control which stretches the video's horizontal. The result is a glorious 16:9 video which fills the screen.

 

[BulkHedd]

Yes, I understand that but when I play the DVD on my widescreen MacBook it doesn't display as widescreen and it should. Also when I preview the project in iDVD it looks squeezed.

Edit: I may have found the problem. I never noticed that little "Video" option triangle in iMovie in the new project section. I have now set it for 16:9 widescreen. Hopefull this will work.

 

[dodomac]

Did you succeed?

I have not been able to store and view the movie as widescreen despite trying the following:

In iMovie
I import the widescreen (16:9) home movie shot on my Sony DV camcorder as video format: DV Widescreen.
This appears (as it says) in DV format except uses 16:9 aspect ratio.
I have problems sending the movie to iDVD due to an unknown error!

In iDVD
I create a new project with aspect ratio: Widescreen (16:9)
I drag the above iMovie into my selected Theme.
However, it is viewed in the 4:3 cropped area only, i.e. 16:9 squashed.
And so the burned dvd appears the same.

If you managed to fix your problem please share your solution.

Thanks in advance.

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I've now tried to create everything in widescreen, i.e. Themes, etc. However, when I view the movie it is still 16:9 displayed in the cropped 4:3 area (as above)! I will keep trying and report back when I find a viable solution.

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A thought just occurred to me. Whilst trying to record directly from my Sony DCR-PC330E DV Camera, the iMovie is displayed as 4:3 even though the DV camera displays its setting as 16:9. I know it works in 16:9 as I had created DVDs from movies previously on a Windows PC.

So it occurs to me that maybe the iMovie s/w doesn't recognise correctly my DV camera. Anyone know anything about this?

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Sorted!

The solution was to set the project frame rate to 25fps, and not 29.97fps.
25fps is PAL whilst the latter is NTSC.
It's a shame apple didn't label this as such or automatically pick this up from your camera.
No matter, I'm getting 16:9 and I'm happy. Still can't share it with iDVD though so have to import manually.