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Best settings for DVD quality

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I have created my movie on iMovie, its currently just under 25mins long and the original footage was 1080p HD. The finished video i now want to be optimised for DVD quality. Im not sure what settings i need or what to do next (first time using iMovie). I clicked finalise project and it said converting to 1080p HD video and the estimated time at the start was 4 HOURS!! So what settings should i use to keep the good quality but perhaps knock a few hours of that time :)
 
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All Finalise does is create a copy of your movie in every resolution possible and make them available via the Media Browser. If you don't won't that then there's no need to do it.

Your exporting at full HD, so it's going to take some time anyway.

Do you have iDVD? If so just share direct to that from iMovie's Share menu.

Standard dvd resolution is only 720x576 or 720x480, so there's no need to export at 1080 anyway.
DVD-Video - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
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I exported it at full resolution which was 1080p so i have the video at a really nice quality, currently in .mov format. My mac didn't come with iDVD, if it did then it would make things a lot easier. I have tried BURN which apparently is meant to be a free alternative to iDVD. When i tried with the video at 780p it converted it to a different format to burn and the end result looked pretty bad, i tried again with the 1080p video and it was better but still not very sharp. There must be a way to retain the original quality?
 
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it converted it to a different format to burn
Yes it will as dvds use the mpeg2 format.

the end result looked pretty bad, i tried again with the 1080p video and it was better but still not very sharp
That's because of the resolution of standard dvds as mentioned above.

There must be a way to retain the original quality?
You can't burn anything other than standard dvds on your Mac. For anything better you will have to buy an external Bluray dvd burner and use Roxio's Toast.
Roxio Toast 11 Titanium - CD, DVD, Blu-Ray Burning Software Program for Mac
 
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Thank you, thats not really the answer i was hoping for but its made it clearer for me :)
Its a wedding video so i thought they would like it playable on DVD player as well as on the computer.
 
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I clicked finalise project and it said converting to 1080p HD video and the estimated time at the start was 4 HOURS!!
I've just Exported an 8 minute Project as a large movie and it took about 30 minutes. HD will take a lot longer depending on your processor speed. Mine's 2GHz.
 
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For the 26minute video it only took an hour. This was exporting it at 1080p, when i clicked finalize it said 4 hours so i dont know why that was supposed to take so much longer. Ive got a 2.7Ghz processor, latest 21.5" iMac.
 
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This was exporting it at 1080p, when i clicked finalize it said 4 hours so i dont know why that was supposed to take so much longer.
Probably because of all the different copies it's producing. Another reason not to Finalise.
 

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