iDVD question

ajay

i have a bunch of video clips from a recent travel that i want to convert to a DVD format - something that would play in a regular dvd player. combined size of these clips is ~1.5GB & 180 minutes.

apparently iDVD projects only support ~60 minutes of video per single layer dvd.

is there any workaround that would let me fit the entire 180 minutes of clips into a single dvd? any other software? any (hidden) settings that i might be missing?

thanks!

bergermeister

If you use double-layer DVDs, you can get about 4 hours of video on one disk:



http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301557





One thing about long videos: make sure to split them into shorter clips and add markers to make skipping through them easy. Lots of people tend to make really long movies and then when they sit down to watch them skip through most of the video because it is simply too long. You can also trim out some of the "dead space" on the clip: the areas where the camera is aimed at the ground, wildly jumping left and right, etc.



If you balance video length, still shots, markers, you can really make a nice presentation. Good luck.

ajay

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bergermeister


If you use double-layer DVDs, you can get about 4 hours of video on one disk:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301557

One thing about long videos: make sure to split them into shorter clips and add markers to make skipping through them easy. Lots of people tend to make really long movies and then when they sit down to watch them skip through most of the video because it is simply too long. You can also trim out some of the "dead space" on the clip: the areas where the camera is aimed at the ground, wildly jumping left and right, etc.

If you balance video length, still shots, markers, you can really make a nice presentation. Good luck.

Thanks! I'll keep those pointers in mind!

these clips are already short enough, between 10 & 20 mins. so that good already. how do i trim the unwanted parts? can i do that in iDVD or iMovie? else, what's a good *free* editor?

kingofsomewherehot

iMovie ... (for more advanced editing, don't go with the version released this month... use the previous version.)

It'll do the editing and gives you an option to "Export to iDVD" where it will automatically fill in a lot of the chapter markers and such.

For a DVD, it has to output the stuff as mp2 video, that's the DVD standard... otherwise it won't work on "all" dvd players... so there's really no way to compress more files onto the DVD, other than moving to a dual-layer DVD.

bergermeister

10 to 20 minutes sounds pretty good. Another fun thing to do would be to create a highlights film of about 5 to 10 minutes highlighting the whole trip. Make a little booklet to fit inside the DVD case and print out nice case jackets.



Each of your large clips is a mini project unto itself that you will save to your hard disk. You can do this with iMovie (06 or 08). Then you open iDVD and drag and drop the movies into it to make your project. Have a couple of photos in iPhoto to add to the DVD menu.



What version of iLife do you have? '06 or '08? There are pluses and minuses to both (and there is a very heated debate raging elsewhere), but either will work fine for your purpose. Personally I have used 06 extensively and have recently started using 08 for my simpler work.



In iMovie'06, you physically cut the video to trim the fat. In '08, you select the sections you want and bring them into your movie. The result is the same: two clips running back to back, but with a section missing. You can smooth out the jump from one clip to the next by adding a simple transition; it doesn't have to be anything fancy, but just something so that it doesn't look like a part got dropped inadvertently.