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iMovie export to iDVD takes FOREVER

Hey kids - need your help.

I've been digitizing home movies from a Sony Camcorder using the XtraView USB for Mac hardware. This produces a (massive) .mov file. I imported this file into iMovie 09 as an event, edited it, put in transitions, etc. I selected Share>iDVD and it exported to iDVD in a reasonable amount of time. In iDVD I tweaked Chapter menus, etc., and burned to disk. No problem.

Now here comes the issue...

Playing the disk back, I realize that I have a really bad interlacing issue. The XtraView HW/SW didn't give me an option to deinterlace, so I'm not terribly surprised, but it's bad enough to not be acceptable. Again, no worries, I used Handbrake to convert the movie to MP4 and deinterlace it along the way. The result was a much smaller, very nice, smooth-playing .mp4 (m4v) file.

When I import this file into iMovie, I can work with it, but the performance is terribly degraded. Not unusable, but noticeably slower. Now, when I've added my chapter markers, transitions, etc. and export to iDVD, it takes 19 HOURS to "Prepare content" and create movie.

I can only assume that this is an issue with the now H.264 file I used.

So my questions are:
- is there a better way to deinterlace the video?
- is there a different format I should be using for the movie file (e.g., FFMPEG?)

Thanks in advance for any help - this previously fun project has gotten incredibly frustrating.

- Roger

iMac 24" 2.6 Ghtz Core 2 Duo, Mac OS X (10.5.8)

Posted on Oct 15, 2009 9:32 AM

Reply
1 reply

Oct 16, 2009 3:42 PM in response to rastriffler

OK, I have a bit more data, and some success!

Using Handbrake I converted the original mov files to mpeg-4 files using the ffmpeg codec rather than the H.264, then imported them as events in iMovie. This time they imported quickly, were responsive when edited, and shared to iDVD quickly, completing in under an hour.

So it would seem that it is the H.264 format that does not play well with iMovie. Still curious if anyone has any suggestions/explanations as to why that may be, but at least for now the problem is resolved.

iMovie export to iDVD takes FOREVER

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