When previewing moving chapters menus in iDVD they now look choppy

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When previewing moving chapters menus in iDVD they now look choppy

When previewing moving chapter menus in iDVD they now look choppy.

By "choppy", I mean it seems like I'm only seeing 1 frame out of every 10. I typically will have 6 or 8 chapters. For each chapter I will select about 30 seconds of video to show in the chapter selections area. But for some reason, this video is now choppy.

I've made no changes to my computer since this issue has cropped up. I'm using a 2.6 GHz i7 Mac Mini with 16G RAM and lots of free space on the solid-state hard drive. iDVD is the only program running.

I think I have enough computer power as my DVD making goes back to the PowerMac G5 days. So this is a brand-new problem for me.

Using Activity Monitor, I found that, "Mediaserver" is at 120% "Encoderserver" is at 96%, iDVD at 2%.

Suggestions appreciated.

Posted on Oct 7, 2015 10:34 AM

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Answer 1

Old Toad

Level 10

207,319 points

Oct 7, 2015 4:09 PM in response to Ziatron

How do they look when the project is encoded and saved as a disk image and viewed with DVD Player?

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Answer 2

Ziatron Author

Level 5

4,185 points

Oct 7, 2015 8:17 PM in response to Old Toad

Hello Old Toad, I did not see your response in the iDVD section. Only when I went to Activities. Hopefully you will find us.

How do they look when the project is saved as a disk image and viewed with DVD Player?

The finished job looks perfect. Plays flawlessly.

Please understand, I find the multitude of various video formats confusing, only by reading your posts and others have I learned (a little) about these formats. ( I began editing video back in the scotch tape and razor blade days. )

I have a theory let me see what you think. For most of the last decade or so, my video was brought into iMovie HD 06 using a Grassvalley ADVC300. This resulted in DV video. iDVD would encode a one hour movie in about 45 minutes using Professional Quality.

More recently, I am using an elgato HDMI game capture device with elgato capture software. This creates a .mp4 (MPEG-4 movie) file. This file will average about 12GB per hour. I am able to import this without difficulty into iMovie HD 06 set at 720P. I then edit in iMovie the same as I always have, with no fuss.

I then share the project with iDVD. So, I suspect that iDVD is now dealing with a lot more data than it was when I was using DV. So, when I am looking at the moving menus in the iDVD preview, I suspect that iDVD is dealing with more video data and has a "harder time" keeping up. Somehow, in the encoding process all this data is compressed for the DVD format and all of the slowness vanishes and I end up with a good result.

Is this clear as mud? Anyway, my theory may be completely wrong, interested to hear what you think.

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Answer 3

Old Toad

Level 10

207,319 points

Oct 8, 2015 8:05 AM in response to Ziatron

I'm not a movie person myself so your theory sounds right to me. 🙂

It's generally recommended that movie to be added to iDVD be at the 480p size. Since iDVD encodes media down to 640 x 480 providing the smaller movie file puts less strain on iDVD to encode down to that which is not it's best feature.

As I already alluded to follow this workflow to help assure the best qualty video DVD:

Once you have the project as you want it save it as a disk image via the File ➙ Save as Disk Image menu option. This will separate the encoding process from the burn process.

To check the encoding mount the disk image, launch DVD Player and play it. If it plays OK with DVD Player the encoding is good.

Then burn to disk with Disk Utility or Toast at the slowest speed available (2x-4x) to assure the best burn quality. Always use top quality media: Verbatim, Maxell or Taiyo Yuden DVD-R are the most recommended in these forums.

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Answer 4

Ziatron Author

Level 5

4,185 points

Oct 8, 2015 3:01 PM in response to Old Toad

Thanks, I appreciate your input.

Practically from day one, I have followed the advice that you outlined above. By saving a disk image first, I am able to utilize Apple's DVD player and check out the final result prior to burning a DVD. Moreover, I like having the disk image file as a backup. If my original DVD is ever damaged it's super easy to make another one from the image file.

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Answer 5

Old Toad

Level 10

207,319 points

Oct 8, 2015 3:10 PM in response to Ziatron

I like having the disk image file as a backup. If my original DVD is ever damaged it's super easy to make another one from the image file.

Oh how right your are. I've been going thru and making disk images of all of my iDVD projects that I had burned before I learned about the disk image trick. So much easier to whip out a new disk that way.

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