Burning an AVCHD Final Cut Express project using iDVD
I have a 1080i AVCHD video that's been edited down to 45 minutes in Final Cut Express, I'd like to burn it to DVD using iDVD, but the quality when I export as a quicktime movie and burn the disc is not good at all. I'm not expecting it to be HD quality. I'm hoping for DVD quality, when I burn this it barely looks VHS quality. It just seems like iDVD isn't compressing it well. Would it look better if I exported it to a quicktime movie from FCE and changed the size to a more DVD friendly 720x480? How do I go about doing that?
In iDVD I'm using Professional quality, I have around 20GB free on the hard drive. Should I free up more space before I try again? Any help here would be great.
1. File>Export>QuickTime Movie (NOT CONVERSION) and burn in iDVD.
2. DO NOT USE "Professional Quality". It will not give the highest quality as it is designed to make the best of DVDs that are well over an hour long.
For the highest quality, as long as your DVD is not much more than 60 minutes use "Best Performance" with the bonus of it burning in less than half the time.
Although I shoot HD on MiniDV, I've had the same problem as JimJim. Like he said, I don't expect HD quality using iDVD, but he's right....it looks a notch below VHS. I've experimented with various settings, including using Best Performance in iDVD, and the result is the same: beautiful HD footage gets degraded to a VHS look. Has anyone else burned HD using iDVD and gotten good results?
Oh, and I've also asked about this problem in the iDVD forum, and so far no one there seems to have any solution, other than to get a Blu Ray burner and Toast 9.
I was exporting as a quicktime movie. I will try "Best Performance" instead of Professional Quality" I thought Professional Quality would look better because it spent more time encoding the video.
Hello,
I have been experimenting with this problem for weeks now. I realize we have no way to quantify "looks great" or "degrades" but this may help. I watch the finished product on a 42" HD Hitachi plasma TV. The AVCHD footage rendered through FCE using either Pro Res 4:2:2 or AIC 1920 x 1080i preset ends up looking worse than SD 720 x 480 when rendered and burned through iDVD. There are compression artifacts all over the screen. De-interlace / re-interlace maybe? Also, using the RGB outputs from the Sony HDR-SR12 looks stunning when played directly through the TV. No compression artifacts visible. So, if the camera can transcode the image so easily in real time, why can't my mac do the same? Just the import alone is a degradation of the image. Seems to me we are waiting for FCE and FCP to have native support for AVCHD.
We have new 8 core Mac Pro towers here at PCC and the results are the same. Apple says no AVCHD support unless you have an intel mac but that is only for import. It does not natively support the format.
Hello,
I kept hearing that it will do the trick so I popped for Toast 9 HD. Results are the same as iDVD. I guess it figures, Toast is using QT render just like the iApps do.
I have a question:
How do you set up iDVD HD so when you play the rendered DVD, in your standard DVD player which sends HD content to your TV over the RGB cables, it captures the TV's resolution and sets it to "FULL" like a regular movie type DVD does?
Even my Sony HDR-SR12 camcorder does that when using the RGB outputs.
My understanding is that Toast 9 requires a blu ray DVD burner in order to create true HD DVDs. As I've said, I'm not expecting full HD using iDVD, I was just hoping to get better results that I'm getting. Christian, I'm curious, what is your procedure for getting good results?