iMovie HD/iDVD Project Length & Size Questions?

[Dream.Finder]

Hello all,

I recently came home from a family vacation to Disney World and I'm currently in the process of editing our vacation video. I am editing in the old iMovie HD editing software (my preference) with it set in the 1080p quality. As it stands, it looks as if my whole video will be clocking in roughly at the 3 and a 1/2 hour mark.

I plan to also add chapters and export this movie to iDVD and add titles and music, etc. on the DVD menus to give it a professionalish touch. My question comes in at the stage of burning the project to a disk... I know this file will be WAY too HUGE for standard DVD-R's. Are there any DVD's out there that can accommodate big projects like this? What do you recommend I do at that point? I'm almost done editing and really don't want to chop up my movie into 3 or 4 disks.

Any thoughts or suggestions on this?

Thanks,
Dream.Finder

 

[daybreak]

To burn this size project will take ages.
I normally transfer my project to a DVD Recorder and use long play for recording.
There are DVD's on the market up to 180min.

 

[comatory]

1. Since it's HD and you want to use optical media, Blu-Ray makes more sense.

2. You should probably do DVD-Video format in Standard Definition and use Long Play discs (I think they're the double layer kind) so it can be playable in classic DVD players.

You can always use some other codecs (H.264) and burn it as a data disc but three and half hours is a lot to fit it on single DVD in HD resolution (in that case do it in Standard Resolution, see 2).

 

[Dave Braine]

If you plan on using iDVD to burn your movie, you will only get standard dvd resolution which is only 720x576/480 depending whether you are PAL or NTSC:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD-Video

With iDVD, you may well be able to get all of your movie onto one disc by going into the Project Menu>Project Info... and selecting a dual layer disc, and then adjusting the quality to see if it will fit.

If you want an HD/BluRay quality dvd, then you will have to use an external HD/BluRay dvd burner and export your iMovie project as a movie file, and use something like Roxio's Toast to burn it to the dvd.
http://www.roxio.com/enu/products/toast/titanium/overview.html