Exporting HD video to iDVD

The zig zag edges are due to interlacing and probably only appear on your computer screen and will be OK on a DVD played on a TV.

However, when I burned HDV to iDVD, movement was unacceptably jittery on the resulting DVD.

The only cure was to either get the camera to down-convert to SD during capture or else edit the HDV project and then copy it into an SD sequence. It then needs rendering which takes about twice the length of the video.

I found it much quicker to simply forget about iDVD and use Compressor and DVDSP.

Interestingly, I've not had DVDSP crash in five years. And I've used it for thousands of replicated DVDs.

Why not explore that issue instead of using a consumer app like iDVD?

I wrote this description over a year ago but it should give you all the info you need for the 2 methods.

Note that iDVD cannot deal with anamorphic SD video so you have to trick it as I describe using QT Pro player.




+1. Edit your HDV/AIC in the timeline. Then create a new DV-PAL (NTSC) Anamorphic sequence. Copy your edited HDV/AIC to the new sequence. Do not alter anything. Render the sequence ..... this will take a long time - up to twice the length of the project. Then File>Export>QuickTime Movie (Not Self-contained).+

+However, if you use the QT Movie in iDVD you will get a squashed 4:3 movie, so first of all you must make QT stretch it out to its proper 16:9 dimensions like this:-+

+a. Open the exported movie file in the QT Pro player.+
+b. Go to Window>Show Movie Properties.+
+c. Select the "Video Track" and in the "Visual Settings" panel uncheck "Preserve Aspect Ratio".+
+d. In the "Scaled Size" box set the width to 1024 pixels for PAL.+or 853 for NTSC+
+e. The "Video Track" will have turned grey, so click it to make it blue again.+
+f. The opened movie file will jump to 16:9.+
+g. Close it with the red button and click Save.+

+2. This method is fast. Set your HV20 to "Locked DV" which means that FCE/FCP will capture it as anamorphic DV and edit it as standard definition anamorphic DV. (Use Easy Setup ... DV-PAL (NTSC) Anamorphic).+

+You can then Export>QuickTime Movie to be used in iDVD and use the stretching technique mentioned above.+



Message was edited by: Ian R. Brown

Step d: 853x480.