[buzzedchiguy]

I recently purchased a Dazzle Hollywood DV Bridge with the intention of converting the movies on my VHS to DVD's. I was able to import the DV just fine into iMovie. It came out to about 2.5 hours, and the size is huge, about 20GB. When I click on the iDVD icon in iMovie, it won't create a new DVD project because the source file exceeds the capacity of a standard blank DVD.

How do people do what I'm trying to do?

In iMovie I also tried exporting my movie as a Quicktime movie, at 320x240 res, but that file came out to 12GB, and it doesn't even look good blown up.

I just want something that will play automatically in any home DVD player, at full-screen and looks decent. What should I do?

Thanks!
-Chris

[k_munic]

iDVD 4 offers just 2h maximum length of a dvd - it makes no difference, how big your files are, it has to do with compression...-

and: a dvd-r just fits 4.4Gigs, a commercial dvd is double layered, so it offers about 9Gb of space...

so, in your case: if you're rich ;-), you could give dvd pro a try, the compression settings are much more elabortated, so maybe your 2,5h can be "crunched" to fit on a dvd-r.

plan B: make two disks.
split your iMovie project into two parts, I + II, make two dvds...- :-)

[grovberg]

Originally posted by k_munic:
iDVD 4 offers just 2h maximum length of a dvd - it makes no difference, how big your files are, it has to do with compression...-

and: a dvd-r just fits 4.4Gigs, a commercial dvd is double layered, so it offers about 9Gb of space...

so, in your case: if you're rich ;-), you could give dvd pro a try, the compression settings are much more elabortated, so maybe your 2,5h can be "crunched" to fit on a dvd-r.

plan B: make two disks.
split your iMovie project into two parts, I + II, make two dvds...- :-)

You wouldn't be able to use iDVD, but there are Dual Layer recorders now and Toast was recently updated to support them. It's a solution that involves money, but pretty much your only one. Bringing the quality any lower than that on a single layer disc is going to give you visually poor results. If you don't care that much about quality, you could burn VCD MPEGs to a DVD, but again, that looks pretty bad.

Check http://www.videohelp.com/ for instructions on how to do all of these things.
-Grover

[buzzedchiguy]

Thanks for the ideas, guys. No, I won't be upgrading hardware to burn dual-layed DVD's. I'll try splitting my movie into less-than-2-hour parts, so that iDVD can use them.

Did you say that DVD Studio Pro might take movies greater than 2 hours? I do indeed have access to that program.

I have one more question. In iMovie, I can choose to export my movie in MPEG-4 format. What is this used for? How is it different than Quicktime movie format or AVI?

Thanks.
-chris

[george68]

I'm in the same boat. I have a bunch of vacation's all edited but they're over 2 hours long. Dammit.

- Rob

[k_munic]

Originally posted by buzzedchiguy:
Thanks for the ideas, guys. No, I won't be upgrading hardware to burn dual-layed DVD's. I'll try splitting my movie into less-than-2-hour parts, so that iDVD can use them.

Did you say that DVD Studio Pro might take movies greater than 2 hours? I do indeed have access to that program.

I have one more question. In iMovie, I can choose to export my movie in MPEG-4 format. What is this used for? How is it different than Quicktime movie format or AVI?

Thanks.
-chris

q1) yes DVD Studio pro can handle videos larger than 2h, but as mentioned in the post above, the compression to fit 2,5h on a 4,4,Gb dvd-r makes the quality.... worse ;-)

q2) mpeg4 is a very mighty compression, which means it crunches video into very small files; the keynote streams of Apple are done in mpeg4 - I watch His Steveness fullscreen via a copper telephone line ;-))
"Quicktime" is often misunderstood as a file format - qt is just a "container"; inside you can find all types of files , mpg1/2/3, motion jpeg, mpeg4 or .avi. all thesee are different methods to compress video (and audio); avi is a standard in the Windows world, such as .wma or .wmv.
files with a .mov at the end need a Quicktime Player which is also available as free download for Windows;
I personally prefer mpeg4, good quality even with low bandwidth - but you earn lots of questions from Windows users ("can't open file!"), because they don't have QT installed.