[zeebe]

Hi, our school just purchased a G4 733 with SuperDrive and we were donated a DVD Studio Pro. I have a couple of questions.
1. Can DVD Studio Pro put more then 1 hour of video on a DVD unlike iDVD?
2. I thought MPEG2 was suppose to make smaller sized movies. I see on Hotline all of these full length movies broken down into two 600 mb files (I am not copying movies!) but when I try to make our 50 minute Christmas program into MPEG 2 it turns out to be 1 gig? Any ideas what I am doing wrong? I am using QT4 for the MPEG conversion (it came with DVD Studio Pro).

Thanks in advance

[jac]

1. iDVD has a fixed bitrate that you can't alter, hence the 1 h time limit. DVDSP has no such limitations and you can fit a lot more than 1 hour of video on each disc.

2.The films on Hotline are most likely compressed with DivX, which compresses video to a smaller size than MPEG2 can, at a slight cost in quality.
Uncompressed, your 50 minutes would be in the neighborhood of 10GB, so MPEG2 does make smaller sized movies, just not as small as with some other compression methods (on the other hand, MPEG2 video is most often better looking).

Hope this clears things up!

[ 06-15-2001: Message edited by: jac ]

[zeebe]

Thanks jac, it does a lot!!

[HalfMoth42]

Say, while on this topic, a quick question to iDVD users... (I haven't seen this asked on this Forum yet, so please forgive if I missed it somewhere.)

I'm guessing that, like iTunes & music, iDVD makes a disk image of your content (basically an all-in-one-place copy) which it then burns to DVD? If that's so, do you have left over a nice MPEG-2 or bunch of MPEG-2 files? Or does iDVD trash the "copy" when it's done? (Trashing it would make burning multiple copies of your DVD project a pain, if iDVD has to keep re-doing the compression!) Can I use iDVD to simply convert video & audio into an MPEG-2 file?

Anyway, thanx to anyone who can help.

--brian f.