iMovie & iDVD, how do I copy home movies with best quality

[Itogator]

Hello:

I've searched the forums but haven't been able to find much on my specific question.

I just started trying to convert my home movies from a mini dv camera to a dvd. I used iMovie to edit and iDVD to burn to a disk. I used the highest settings but a 1 hour video only filled 1.7GB on a disk. The output looked terrible on my 50 inch tv. When I hook up the camera directly to the tv, the quality is great. Is there a way to have iMovie/iDVD compress the video less? For example, could it make a 1 hour video take up 4+ gigs on a disk? If not, how do I go about doing this? What is the best way to make home movies look great on a large tv?

I should also mention that I have a copy of Final Cut Studio 5 that a friend had an extra key for. I was told on another thread that I should stick to imovie for home movies as FCS is really hard to learn. Can FCS5 make a 1 hour home movie fill a dvd for best quality?

Thanks in advance.

 

[huntercr]

Hello:

I've searched the forums but haven't been able to find much on my specific question.

I just started trying to convert my home movies from a mini dv camera to a dvd. I used iMovie to edit and iDVD to burn to a disk. I used the highest settings but a 1 hour video only filled 1.7GB on a disk. The output looked terrible on my 50 inch tv. When I hook up the camera directly to the tv, the quality is great. Is there a way to have iMovie/iDVD compress the video less? For example, could it make a 1 hour video take up 4+ gigs on a disk? If not, how do I go about doing this? What is the best way to make home movies look great on a large tv?

I should also mention that I have a copy of Final Cut Studio 5 that a friend had an extra key for. I was told on another thread that I should stick to imovie for home movies as FCS is really hard to learn. Can FCS5 make a 1 hour home movie fill a dvd for best quality?

Thanks in advance.

Do you have an HD camera? iDVD only supports burning standard def DVDs, so it's going to look bad on a 50inch HD TV.

make sure you don't deinterlace the video, and do export it directly to iDVD, and make sure the quality settings are set to their highest for iDVD.

Good luck.

 

[Itogator]

Do you have an HD camera? iDVD only supports burning standard def DVDs, so it's going to look bad on a 50inch HD TV.

make sure you don't deinterlace the video, and do export it directly to iDVD, and make sure the quality settings are set to their highest for iDVD.

Good luck.

Thanks for the quick reply.

My camera is a standard def mini dv camera. When you say import directly to iDVD, are you saying I should bypass iMovie? If so, do I use the option where the movie is imported as is from the camera? Also, is there a way to put chapters for scene selection in the DVD? How do I not deinterlace the video?
Sorry for all the questions but I am new at this and I'm pretty lost.
Thanks for your help.

 

[theBB]

Which iMovie version are you using?

I don't have the most recent one, but the previous version iMovie HD '06 gives you an option to set the kind of project in the beginning as dv or mpeg4 (along with other high def options.) If I pick the latter, the quality is quite poor, but of course it takes up less space. If I select dv, it looks really nice. Make sure your settings in iMovie is proper.

In iDVD, you need to select Best Quality, not Best Performance and make sure your project stays under 1 hour. I think that one hour includes the menus etc.