Burning an AVCHD Final Cut Express project using iDVD

How exactly are you exporting it? You should export to QuickTime Movie and use best performance in iDVD for compression.

Yes, free up more drive space. You barely have enough for what iDVD might have to do.

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 burn HDV project from FCE using iDVD all the time. The quality is excellent -- I'd call it near-HD.

Did you follow the advice above and output to a QT movie?

How are you exporting from FCE?

A lot of people have that misconception.

The reason it takes so long is because it is trying to squeeze over an hour of video onto a DVD that should only take an hour of video max.

So it passes over the video twice in an attempt to assess what bits need reasonably high bitrates and the parts that can get away with low bitrates.

Best Performance on the other hand, gives everything the maximum (high quality) bitrate possible.

I'm exporting from FCE as a QT movie (not conversion) then importing that file into iDVD.

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.

There's no such thing as iDVD HD.

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?

Incidentally, I'm capturing my HDV footage using Apple Intermediate Codec 1080i60. Is that the correct setting?

Depends on the camera.