Project Duration in iDVD 7.1.2????

Hi

iDVD 08, 09 & 11 has three levels of qualities. (version 7.0.1, 7,0.4 & 7.1.1) and iDVD 6 has the two last ones

• Professional Quality

(movies + menus up to 120 min.) - BEST (but not always for short movies e.g. up to 45 minutes in total)

• Best Performances

(movies + menus less than 60 min.) - High quality on final DVD (Can be best for short movies)

• High Quality (in iDVD08 or 09) / Best Quality (in iDVD6)

(movies + menus up to 120 min.) - slightly lower quality than above

Menu can take 15 minutes or even more - I use a very simple one with no audio or animation like ”Brushed Metal” in old Themes.

About double on DL DVDs.

MENU duration - HowTo minimize this

• Use an old theme without any animation - I use in Old Themes - Brushed Metal

• I turn off the animation button - so it get's black

--------->

• NO audio addad to the Menu

Resulting in a Menu taking less than 1 minutes from my Movie project time.

ALSO

• Secure a minimum of 25GB free space on the Start-Up (Boot) (Mac-OS) Hard Disk. It must be here to let Mac OS and iDVD run as intended - space on other hard disks will NOT HELP as non of them can be addressed to take all temp files made during the DVD encoding process.

Yours Bengt W

iDVD does not care about file size, only about file length before it compresses to mpeg2 format.

120 minutes is the maximum for a single-layer disk.

iDVD encoding settings:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=iDVD/7.0/en/11417.html

Short version:

Best Performance is for videos of up to 60 minutes

Best Quality is for videos of up to 120 minutes

Professional Quality is also for up to 120 minutes but even higher quality (and takes much longer)

That was for single-layer DVDs. Double these numbers for dual-layer DVDs.

Professional Quality: The Professional Quality option uses advanced two-pass technology to encode your video (The first pass determines which parts of the movie can be given greater compresson without quality loss and which parts can’t. The second pass then encodes those different parts accordingly) , resulting in the best quality of video possible on your burned DVD. You can select this option regardless of your project’s duration (up to 2 hours of video for a single-layer disc and 4 hours for a double-layer disc). Because Professional Quality encoding is time-consuming (requiring about twice as much time to encode a project as the High Quality option, for example) choose it only if you are not concerned about the time taken.

In both cases the maximum length includes titles, transitions and effects etc. Allow about 15 minutes for these.

You can use the amount of video in your project as a rough determination of which method to choose. If your project has an hour or less of video (for a single-layer disc), choose Best Performance. If it has between 1 and 2 hours of video (for a single-layer disc), choose High Quality. If you want the best possible encoding quality for projects that are up to 2 hours (for a single-layer disc), choose Professional Quality. This option takes about twice as long as the High Quality option, so select it only if time is not an issue for you.

Use the Capacity meter in the Project Info window (choose Project > Project Info) to determine how many minutes of video your project contains.

NOTE: With the Best Performance setting, you can turn background encoding off by choosing Advanced > “Encode in Background.” The checkmark is removed to show it’s no longer selected. Turning off background encoding can help performance if your system seems sluggish.

And whilst checking these settings in iDVD Preferences, make sure that the settings for NTSC/PAL and DV/DV Widescreen are also what you want.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1502?viewlocale=en_US

Just to add into this discussion.

There are many ways to store video (Video-codecs)

on Video-DVDs - only one sort will do and only one structure possibly - if to be played on standard DVD-players.

the DVD standard

So I've got video files on 500MB - that are to large when iDVD coded it for Video-DVD (sort of .mpeg2)

and I've got video files on 50GB - that fit's nicely as it's compresed .mpeg2 version is so much smaller.

iDVD - only cares about time and that is Movie Duration + Menu Duration

Use Roxio Toast™ if You want to squees in more on a SL-DVD (up to 7-10 hours) - BUT the quality will be anything from Bad to Worse.

Recordings on VHS-tapes in LP-mode or even EP-mode will excell over a 7 hour SL-DVD.

Yours Bengt W

I tried clicking on the link and that did not work

It works for me.

I have never used an avi file with iDVD.

.avi is no Video Codec - but a container and needs to be opened to find out what Codec it carries.

I think VLC-player can do this

Open it

then at to top row menu far to the right / Windows

down to Media information or [ cmd+I ]

then Codec details

Read and tell

Yours Bengt W

dKlaus:

This link, http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=iDVD/7.0/en/11417.html, at the top of your post takes us to the Apple application support top page. The link at the bottom does take us to the iDVD 09 About Encoding Settings document.

OT

Thanks for pointing that out! They should have been the same! Will correct and amend! 🙂