iMovie to iDVD Blues

My son got married and we took a bunch of DV video with a new Panasonic camera. I was able to play with iMovie and various audio tracks and finally have a neat movie. It looks good in iMovie. Not Oscar, but quite good.

The entire file appears to be 9.5 gigs in size and the entire movie is 43 minutes long. I have tried to follow the instuctions on iDVD and iMovie to export the file in some format that can go into the DVD. After 2 days of failed experiments, I finally dragged a Qtime file into the empty DVD and it gave me a really lousy an jerky movie. I guess we have to compress it, as it is too big to go in a 4.7 gig DVD-R disk. There were many ways to compress, but no explanation of the benefits of each. Obviously I would like the best quality possible, but beyond that I don't know.

One of the big issues seems to be that compressing it to Sorenson 3 for example, made it a 700 minute excercise! WOW. What am I doing wrong?
:dummy:
Does it take a dozen hours to compress a movie? Is there any other solution?

I guess I can take it to a lab somewhere, but I was hoping to do this on my Powerbook.

Any feedback would be appreciated. I promissed my son and daughter in law a great movie a few weeks ago and haven't delivered yet.

Hi

I think this site will help you with your project: http://www.mac.com/1/learningcenter/ I have made a DVD with iMove and iDVD. I had no idea what I was doing until I found this tutorial. It help me out a lot.

I also have a Panasonic DV cam as well. I shot about 1 hour of video. Once I finished editing the movie (total movie time was 50min after editing) and sent it to iDVD the rendering part took a while. With the menus and the video it took 2 1/2 hours to completion on my powerbook G4 1.67ghz and 1 gig of ram. Rendering just takes a long time.

There is a book that comes with a instuctional DVD on iLife 05. I have it and it is a great book. Check it out http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/t...v=glance&s=books&n=507846?tag=macforums0e4-20 . Hope this info helps!