[SeSawaya]

Just spent an entire week with iMovie and iDVD 3 on an iMac 800 with a gig of ram. (borrowed)

After working 20+ hours a day with this program all I can say is it seems to be EXTREMELY buggy. Main problems occurs with the audio it seems. Some chapters the sonud just dosent exist. Other times the sound may be off as much as 6 seconds from the video. Other probelms are a 90 min DVD can take 5 hours to reder and burn even though it says 120 mins.

Seems Apple has a ways to go to make this an enjoyable mac experience for a non video professional user. I was going to buy an iMac in a month to be able to do this for my school/myself, but after this horrible experience, I dont even want to see another one.

I guess if you can afford the money for DVD studio and final cut pro, then you can get things to work. I made a total of 5 DVDs (and 2 copies of each) that worked in 6 days. WTF?

Ok enough of my ranting. Just a warning to someone with a time sensitive project. Dont count on these apps like I did. It just cost me around $1000.

[buddhabelly]

YMMV. with all applications. I understand that it is annoying that the progress bar reports such a short time, but let's be realistic here. Your encoding 90min of video to mpeg-2. thats 162,000 frames that have to be processed, plus audio.

I do agree with you on the sound problem. I have had sound drift even in FCP.

Bottom line is that no software is perfect.

How did it cost $1000 dollars when you borrowed the iMac?

[Uncle Skeleton]

you worked 20+ hours per day for 6 days? don't you need sleep? (you know, to prevent user errors? j/k)

[hyperlucid]

Just curious, did you burn it to a 1X disc or a 2X disc? I'm guessing it was 1X due to the length of time it took, but I have heard that generally, burning the disc at 1X is far more reliable than 2X (which tends to be more buggy - even with Apple media).

[SeSawaya]

-1x burn rate.

-how did it cost me a $1000? Becuase thats how much money I WILL NOT make from the project now because iDVD messed up. I no longer have access to the iMac and cant afford to go out and buy one. Although it has crossed my mind a few times....

-Sleep, whats that? Sleep deprevation is not something I like either.

In iDVD preview, everything is beautiful, works perfectly like in iMove, then the encoding starts. Who knows what happens next.

The time for the 90 min DVD was virtually the same as the 60 minute ones. At least I got something done. Just nothing that pays. Then again nothing ever works for me.....EVER.

[Mark E]

i tried to use idvd once. didn't like it. as someone said, it took friggin' HOURS to render the footage. i had a 60 minute DV file i tried to convert, i gave up after 3 hours. it said i had 180 minutes left.. the number of minutes kept going up!

i then exported it to MPEG-2 with the QT plug-in.. it converted it in about 90 minutes. (this is on a 1Ghz imac with 768 MB ram btw.)

now i just need to work out how to use DVD studio pro, and i can make my own DVDs..

[zigzag]

SeSawaya, see if you can borrow a Mac with iMovie2 and iDVD2 - I and many others have found that they are much more stable and reliable. I agree that Apple messed up on the most recent upgrade and I hope it won't prevent you from getting a Mac - hopefully the bugs will be worked out soon.

[icruise]

Since you no longer have access to the Mac, there isn't anything that we can do to help you now, but the Apple discussion forums have quite a bit of good information on iDVD problems and solutions. For the record, iDVD3 has worked fine for me.

[JB72]

Originally posted by SeSawaya:
-how did it cost me a $1000? Becuase thats how much money I WILL NOT make from the project now because iDVD messed up.

I'm sorry for the financial losses you took on your video project made in iMovie. Send my condolences to your cast, crew, management, and financial backers.

Go get some help here: http://www.2-pop.com/ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php

[SeSawaya]

yah I'm cooled off a bunch now but am still disapointed as you could imagine. I'm thinking of purchasesing an eMac as soon as the update comes out. (whenever that might be)

If I had the time and the resources, I'd love to check out FCP and DVD studio Pro, just to see the diffrences. The menue feature on iDVD is amazing. I had some incredible stuff (in my book) set up for the chapters, but the rendering time of 6+ hours scared me, so I took a bunch of the stuff out hoping it would improve. it really didnt.

The probelm with iMovie 2/idvd 2 are NO chapters. This is what I was waiting for (wasnt everyone) and clearly a MUST for any DVD.

I remember having pnemonia at the end of January sitting on my couch with my ibook, waiting for the new version of imovie to come out so I could work on my honeymoon video while I was home for a week +. It was a great experience, never crashed unlike a lot of people here, then finally I got a chance to convert it. It worked GREAT in iDVD3!!!

Then I made my real project, and lord what a trial. Maybe next time things will work.



thanks for the link above!!!

[JB72]

I think most film orvideo projects are a bit of a hair-puller. Some worse than others.

The latest iApps are better if you cab get ahold of them. They are really useful. Although I maybe sense Final Cut Express in your future?

Good luck, and keep making movies!

[SeSawaya]

you know FInal cut express is really temting for me. $300 would be the only thing slowing me down from getting right off the bat. What CANT you do with FCE as opposed to FCP?

[Uncle Skeleton]

I'm under the impression that FCE's only limitation is that it can only import DV-codec content. but I've never used either

[wilsonX]

Might want to also look at the ram. I had a big project last year and had major problems with what I thought was decent ram. As it turns out, I borrowed some ram from a friend and everything went great after that. I am sure it was my ram because I switched it in and out with my friend's good ram. The project always worked with his ram in my g4 733 superdrive but did not with my ram in there.

My ram was crap bought from OWC-Other World Computing aka macsales.com. It was stamped PC100 on the circuit board but had a sticker placed on it by OWC that read PC133.

Also, speed wise, Aren't the machines you are using have only a level 2 cache? Everything went very well for me using those applications...(I have a level 3 cache and lots of harddrive space).

If you are buying something in the future, I would get something with a level 3 cache ...IMHO every lttle bit of speed boost helps with video editing.

By the way, do you have any cd's of you playing the steel drum (went to your website once and heard the piece you had there. Thought it was great! I would buy a copy off of you if available)

[Old Toad]

Take a close look at the eMac. I've heard and read some nasty things about it.

If you're using you Mac in a business, buy the most you can afford.

Good Luck

[alex_kac]

Just FYI. There is a known issue in iDVD3 when burning 12-bit music from a DV Cam.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.h...us%7C169706742