[jamesl]

Hi, I have got ilife installed on my G3 mac (its not the new version with garageband etc). I want to edit the video in imovie, and would like to burn it to dvd, however, I do not have a DVDRW drive. Is there any way that i could exdport from imovie into MPEg format, so that my mate can produce a dvd on his pc for me?

Thanks

[Jacke]

Originally posted by jamesl:
Hi, I have got ilife installed on my G3 mac (its not the new version with garageband etc). I want to edit the video in imovie, and would like to burn it to dvd, however, I do not have a DVDRW drive. Is there any way that i could exdport from imovie into MPEg format, so that my mate can produce a dvd on his pc for me?

Thanks

You mean you want to edit an MPEG file in iMovie or just export to MPEG from iMovie?
If it's the second, it's a very bad idea to go from DV -> MPEG -> DVD. I'd look into ways of getting the edited DV to your friends PC so he can encode that to DVD format or MPEG-4 that can handle the transitions (DV -> MPEG-4 -> DVD) better (with less quality loss).

Either way, this is in the wrong forum.

[Uncle Skeleton]

There are a few things you want to avoid if possible: extra re-encoding steps, and any encoding on your G3. G3s are not speedy at video encoding (or decoding for that matter). And in general, any time you re-encode a video you will lose significant quality.

So keeping that in mind, what kind of edits are you talking about, and what are the properties of the source file (resolution, framerate, mpeg1 or mpeg2, bitrate, audio sample rate)? If it's already DVD-compliant MPEG2 or VCD compliant MPEG1, and all you want to do is cut and paste (like removing commercials or picking out certain scenes), you might not have to re-encode even once. EyeTV's software and the open-source mpgtx (and probably a few more) can manipulate MPEG streams by just removing segments (usually not frame-accurate though) and not re-encoding. If you are planning more complicated editing like transitions, titles or other effects, you will have to re-encode at least twice (since basically no editors can work with MPEG video directly). I suggest in that case you re-encode to DV and use iMovie, then find a way to send iMovie's DV output to the PC before encoding back to MPEG to author the DVD/VCD. Depending on the length of the movie, your G3 could easily spend several days trying to encode it to MPEG again.