Trying to add a 45 min clip to a 3 min clip. 45 min clip exports alone just fine, and so does the 3 min clip. Together they export with no final product. Any help?

Question

I've been working on a compilation made up of video clips of my friends' wedding.  There are 18 clips all together of the ceremony and random stuff from the wedding.  I spent a few days (a couple hours at a time of course) working to get the clips in the proper arrangement with some transitions and volume adjustment.  12 of the clips are of the ceremony alone, and the other 6 are the random stuff.  I put all of the ceremony clips together in one project and exported just fine (approx 42 mins).  I also put the extras together and exported just fine (approx 3 mins).  I duplicated the original ceremony project and added in the extras to have an extended version which is all clips in chronological order (approx 45 mins).  I originally tried exporting the extended, but there was no final video.  I then tried the ceremony vid and it exported just fine.  I then went ahead and tried the extended again but still the same thing, no video.  I then tried the extras alone in one clip and it also exported just fine.  I would like to have a DVD of the basic ceremony as one selection, and extended version as the other.  Can anyone help me with trying to figure out what might be going wrong?
The extended version lets me choose to export just as the other two clips, and just as I've been exporting since I had iMovie 11 (I've uploaded over 100 vids to youtube using the same settings, by sharing with Quicktime.).  When the export process is done there's no message, and the video isn't on my desktop which is where I have all of my vids exported to, and when I do a spotlight search all I get is the project file.
Please help, this DVD is very important to my friends (the newly weds) and I, any advice is appreciated, thanks in advance!
Message was edited by: AlexRC113

Answer 1

Good to hear that you've had some success with the import.
I tried 3 times to do it before I finally changed it to H.264, and it worked on the first try.  The quality of the compression was terrible with those settings compared to my standard settings, but I'm just glad it worked.
Rather than Share>Export using QuickTime and then choosing your own settings for H.264, you may get a better result if you simply use the Share>Export Movie option. Alternatively, use the Share>Media Browser option (as I mentioned in my earlier post). You will be presented with a range of sizes to choose from. Depending on your target, it's usually best to select the highest size available, such as Large, HD 720p or HD 1080p. However, for producing a DVD it's best to not go beyond the HD 720p size, as the DVD will be downscaled during encoding to Standard Definition in the appropriate size for either PAL or NTSC.
In my experience, both these options (Export Movie or Media Browser) produce a video file of excellent quality. The files will be in H.264 format and will have the file extension .mov or .m4v depending on the size of the export. I'm assuming that your camera records HD video in AVCHD format.
These files work well with iDVD (or other DVD authoring programs). The export process for the presets is optimised by Apple to produce high quality video files at a reasonable file size. So, selecting a preset may give you a much better result. Choosing your own H.264 settings when using the "Export using QuickTime" method could be why "the compression was terrible". You may have selected a data (bit) rate that was too low. There is always a trade-off between quality and file size when compressing video.
So, to summarise, try one of the Apple presets using either Share>Export Movie or Share>Media Browser.
John