Messed up DVD

If any of you can answer the following questions, perhaps I then will be able to turn out a decent DVD.
My project was a 57 min.( just under 4 GB) video of a wedding. Did all the importing, transitions, effects etc. in iMovie. Previewed it a couple hundred times before I turned it over to iDVD. iDVD was a trip trying to learn how to alter a theme, add photos, audio and setting up chapters. But, figured it out. Saved it and burned the project. When I played it, the audio from original footage (not what I added in effects) lagged just a bit from the video. Made the whole project look stupid. Looked like an old Godzilla movie.
Heres my questions:
1. How important is it to enable asset encoding in the background?
2. Any ideas why the sound and video(of the original DV camcorder footage) was off sync.? I did do a little trimming and splitting. The footage was not off-sync. when viewed as preview in both iMovie and iDVD.
3. Is the final product always rendered as a Quicktime movie?
4. Will I always be left with with (3) movie files when completed, 1 original iMovie file, 1 quicktime file and 1 DVD file? (lots of disc usage here!)
The reason why I ask about the enable background encoding is because for another attempt, I turned off background encoding. Not only did it take longer to complete, but I had (2) system failures on the mighty G5!! Absolutely locked it solid. Left all types of wording in black bands across the screen. This sort of shook me as the G5 has been rock solid since I bought it last May.
I bought this mac with plans to do a lot of video editing. This was my really first attempt to crank out a movie. I'm sure that it was my doing that caused the problems. Until I buy a book on how to make movies in iLife'04, any words of wisdom will greatly be appreciated.

what was the original movie format, before imovie/any editing? did you burn using idvd or toast?

Macman:
The original footage is JVC mini DV directly out of the camcorder and into iMovie, then into iDVD.
Like I said, I did do quite a bit of editing in iMovie. Even though, I don't see how this could have affected the videos synchronization. How can iMovie change the original footage?? Weird!

oops! sorry, I did burn it in iDVD.

what kind of editing did you do in imovie? if possible, as soon as it hits imovie, export to a mpg or something, then edit in another app if its possible to do the same editing in another app, idvd will work better with mpg or .mov.

I suggest outputting your final file from iMovie to DV footage on your computer then using Compressor to convert it into the mpg-2 and the aiff audio file format that DVDs use. iDVD should be able to use these files to then mux them together.

I appreciate all the good advice. However, am I missing something here? Are you all saying that I can't accomplish what I thought iMovie and iDVD was made to do?
I mean if your suggestions are the best way to go at it, then I'm all ears.
Guess I thought iMovie/iDVD was all seamless....maybe not.

In iMovie I added fade-in/out effects, added some photos with Ken Burns effect, heres the big one, used the brigtness effect to lighten up about 6 dark clips, (takes forever to render) added another short video clip with a song created in Garage Band, had to trim some video in order to fit the the song, split a clip added some black & white effects, some old film effects, faded out.........The End.

trpnmonkey41:
Read your link. Checked camcorder. Was set at 16 bit. audio.

AHHHHH.. It sounds like me doing video editing on Windows..

I know how s**ty you feel.

I'm not sure whats wrong though..

You may be able to resolve audio synchronization issues by extracting the audio from the video clips in the iMovie project to a separate audio track:

1. Select all video clips in the timeline (from the Edit menu, choose Select All).
2. Extract audio to a separate track (from the Advanced menu, choose Extract Audio).

I wanted to add, don't know if means anything, that the same movie that is out of sync that iDVD burned, plays as it should(normal in sync) in Quicktime player. This leads me to believe that during the iDVD burn process, something got totally messed up. I have another question, if I were to burn the moviethat plays normal in Quicktime, with out the cute theme introduction in iDVD, would the quality of the burned QT movie be the same as the iDVD quality? Sorry to be so lame on this subject, but I'm just trying to save myself some time and discs.
Thanks

ibmac'n during the burning process were you using your system to do other things?

To me it does just sound like a faulty burn rather than an actual problem with your system...

I'd recommend using iDVD's hidden 'save as disk image' feature to create a .dmg of your DVD which you can then test with DVD player without wasting another blank dvd.

If that plays alright, use toast to burn the VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS in the .dmg file to burn to disk.

To use the hidden 'save as' feature you need two special files in your home directory, do a quick google for hurz, pfurz and there should be more instructions.

rman said:

ibmac'n during the burning process were you using your system to do other things?

Click to expand...

Nothing. Just watching the process work. I started to think about the mac going to sleep, so I moved the mouse to refresh, this is when my second crash occured.

aptmunich: I burned two discs. Both came out with the problem.

As I read your replies, I'm wondering why nobody has defended iDVD. Lots of suggestions to burn in another app. Do you all think iDVD is a waste?

I have never used iDVD with videos but I do use it for lots of slideshows and it works great