Why is the file so big?

[ArtOfWarfare]

Ok, so I have a video file at a little over 1:40 hours long with dimensions of 480x272. It's an MPEG-4 Video File. I originally meant for it to go on my iPhone, but now I've reconsidered and I want to burn it to a DVD.

The video takes up 856.9 MB of space on my HD (according to Finder... I'm running Snow Leopard now which means this number is base ten, not two.) When I drop it into iDVD, slap a theme on it, and tell it to burn, it tells me it's too much to burn. I hit the little disclose triangle and it tells me the file is... over 5 GB!? How is it that just by dragging the video into iDVD, it's gone to being 6x as large!?

And more importantly, how do I just get the dang video onto my DVD!?

 

[r.j.s]

iDVD recalculates the size based on how big it will be, once it is converted to DVD quality.

Check Project > Project Info ... then Encoding. There you should be able to adjust the quality to fit on the DVD.

 

[ArtOfWarfare]

Thanks, I changed it from "Best Performance" to "Professional Quality" or something like that... in any event, it's only ~3900 MB now which will actually fit on a DVD.

 

[r.j.s]

I'm not sure why iDVD doesn't automatically adjust the quality in order to fit on the disc, that would make more sense.