What is the best way to burn a DVD with video taken with my Iphone 4?

[Eddie52]

I currently purchased a brand new Macbook Pro 2010. The first thing I bought was the DVD burning software of Toast Titanium 10. I imported the video I took on my Iphone 4 to my Macbook pro and then onto Imovie. I've since edited my video and export it to my desktop. I burned it onto a DVD and when I played it on my 46inch television it looked horrible. I thought since I was taking 720p video on my Iphone that it would look at least decent on a DVD. I thought burning my DVD with Toast instead of IDVD would make a difference but it did not. In a way I'm a noob at all this 'Mac' stuff... What is the best way to burn video taken with my Iphone 4 onto a DVD and still have the highest quality video? Can It be that I should give up trying to burn video taken on my iphone 4 and just get a 'real' HD camera?

Any help is greatly appreciated

 

[AdrianK]

It's irrelevant that the recorded video is 720p, DVDs are only 480p.

Assuming you're in an NTSC region, that's 720*480, vs 1280*720 that it was originally recorded in. So you only retain 38% of the definition. Not to mention that you do undergo a generation of loss when you export from iMovie (though this is quite minimal, if you use Apple's standard 720p option).

Alternatives:
Buy Apple's dock to HDMI converter, then plug an HDMI lead in to your TV and the converter.
Stick the movie on a thumbdrive and plug it in a PS3 or Xbox 360, if you have one.
Get a bluray player, burn the video to a DVD *AS DATA* (not the best option, may require further encoding).

 

[Eddie52]

Thank you Adrian for your response. I am in an NTSC region, but the alternatives that you mentioned aren't really an option for me. I'm trying to send a home video to a loved on that is currently on deployment so that pretty much eliminates those alternative. From what I know I'm not allowed to ship thumb drives with 'Data', and getting a Apple dock to HDMI converter seems expensive let alone I don't know if they even have an HD television wherever this person is at. I did burn a music video that was in HD and it came out way better than my home movie. If DVD's are only 480p no matter how you slice it, what would be the best way to get the highest quality video taken from a camera to burn directly to a DVD? I have a separate camera that takes 1080p video but if I want to edit that video with Imovie for instance, does that automatically reduce the quality of it as I export it?

Would it be best to burn as data so that the person receiving this video could watch it on a computer instead of on a television?

Just seems weird that a music video picture quality came out so good when my home video came out horribly pixelated.