Just bought an IMac!

[thunderman]

Mainly for its video editing abilities! How do I burn an HD movie to DVD? is that even possible?

 

[RavingMac]

Mainly for its video editing abilities! How do I burn an HD movie to DVD? is that even possible?

You use iDvD. And, yes it is possible, providing the movie file size is such to fit on a DvD.

 

[pigoo3]

You use iDvD. And, yes it is possible, providing the movie file size is such to fit on a DvD.

And assuming that the movie was legally acquired.

- Nick

 

[RavingMac]

And assuming that the movie was legally acquired.

- Nick

Good point, Nick!
Never even occured to me . . . I was assuming a self produced movie.

 

[thunderman]

Yes. I am in the television industry and need to shoot in 16:9 today for a virtual tour I am going to produce at home. Basically I want to take school kids through our set while they are at school!

 

[Deckyon]

I have noticed that even if you take a movie that was made into an HD movie, iDVD will encode it for the standard wide-screen DVD format and drop the 1080 down. I do not think this will change until full Blue Ray support comes.

For example:
768 photos at 3200x2400 (rough estimates) put together, set to music and rendered as HD 1080i in iMovie is NOT 1080i when burnt onto a DVD with iDVD.

Now, I took the rendered movie and exported it to a 1080i MP4 file and burnt it on my Win7 Bootcamp to a friend's portable BR Burner and it was burnt at 1080i Blue Ray.

I am also finding that there are a lot of movies (as I pull my collection of over 500 down for my video library) are burnt on Dual Layer DVDs (hold 8GB rather than 4.6GB). So, you can burn the video file to a Dual Layer and then watch on a player that supports file playback (MP3, MP4, WMV...)

 

[pigoo3]

Good point, Nick!
Never even occured to me . . . I was assuming a self produced movie.

Piracy or illegal "ripping" is usually more common than self-produced...but sounds like you were right since "thunderman" clarified things for us!

- Nick

 

[thunderman]

OK, totally new to Mac here so forgive me. iDVD is the burner in my new mac? It is a good burner?

 

[pigoo3]

OK, totally new to Mac here so forgive me. iDVD is the burner in my new mac? It is a good burner?

iDVD is a software application...part of "iLife" which I think is preinstalled on new computers:

Apple - iDVD - Create DVDs of your movies and photo slideshows.

- Nick

 

[thunderman]

Wow, looks awesome!! I bought Adobe Premiere 9 the other day, how does iMovie compare? Final Cut?

 

[pigoo3]

Wow, looks awesome!! I bought Adobe Premiere 9 the other day, how does iMovie compare? Final Cut?

- Final Cut or Final Cut Express costs from $199 - $999
- Adobe Premier Elements around $99
- iLife $49...and iDVD is only a small part of iLife

So iDVD is a good little program..but if you want more features...

- Nick

 

[Deckyon]

If you have Adobe Premiere 9, then don't worry about either iMovie or Final Cut. No need to double spend on something like Final Cut.

If you buy a new iMac, iLife comes on it already (iMovie, iPhoto, iDVD...) so you dont have to worry about buying it.

I have used iDVD for some projects and it is simple enough to throw together a simple DVD with a workable menu in a few minutes. I have not gotten to where I have done anything with Chapters (don't need chapters in a 5 min demo) but I will be looking to do that here shortly.

I have the whole Sony Creative suite on my Win7 Bootcamp, but I wanted to mess with the Apple tools for a bit.