What format for saving files for idvd

I am new to Finalcut pro, I want to save and render a completed project on an external Hard Drive. I would like to find a format that I can just drag the file into iDVD. The cameras I am using are Canon Vixia HFS20's

I'd recommend exporting a master file – Pro Res 422 – and to bring that file into iDVD. iDVD will recognize your movie as 16X9 and will create an anamorphic standard def DVD. Should look great.
Good luck.
Russ

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What format for iDVD?

I'm using AE CS4. I render out QT with"None" as the compressor for my 2minute motiion graphic. It looks great. Turns out that iDVD doesn't see it! And when I open it in Quicktime the attributes panel says it has no video track! It's got something because it's over a GB.
What is the best quality that iDVD will accept?
Or should I change my process? I want to avoid re-compressing and losing quality. Do I misunderstand something??
Thanks for answering this question
JL
MacbookPro, iDVD 7 (iLife09), AE CS4

The way I've understood the process - the bigger the file the better
looking the outcome but I will gladly try Animation and PNG.
There are many cases where this is true, and others where the file size to quality ratio is not so obvious.
Animation and PNG are identical to "None" at a fraction of the file size, because they use lossless data shrinking techniques while keeping the image quality untouched. People who are concerned with these things, test this by overlaying (say) a PNG-encoded file on top of a None file and check if they are identical when performing a difference operation. This is why Animation and PNG are considered mathematically lossless.
Just to make sure - I need some clarification please - you said:
"They actually loose a rather lossy compression scheme, MPEG-2 video at a rather low datarate."
Did
you mean "They actually USE..." or is there something else ? Your
explanation was so helpful I wouldn't want to misunderstand any of it.
Yes, sorry. I meant they actually USE
That's what happens when you type this fast.

Newbie: What format for I-movie

I had to download and install a program to make my Casio AVI clips compatible with i-movie. What format should I choose, and what format for the whole movie? What will work best on a TV screen?
I tried .mov and .mpeg and .mpeg4 but the clips are unproportional once I get them into i-movie ( they are stretched horizontally).
Where I am going wrong??
Julie

Good question... but it does explain the stretch.
It seems odd that the camcorder does not shoot in a regular format.
They make an iMovie plugin at cf/x, found at http://www.imovieplugins.com that can alter the aspect ratio.
Here is the description:aspect ratio
what is it?
this iMovie plug-in changes the clip's aspect ratio, either enlarging or shrinking the clip. it's primary use is to re-establish the correct aspect ratio after rotating a non-square pixel clip, or after importing footage from a different video format (e.g. 4:3 to HD 16:9, TV, NTSC<-->PAL, 16:9). the plug-in sports pre-sets to convert between the most common video-formats, which can additionally be overriden by hand-tuning +/-50% in both the horizontal and vertical direction.
for parts that have to be enlarged, the plug also provides bi-cubic interpolation.
when should i use it?
use this plug-in whenever you need to adjust/tweak the aspect ratio of a clip (e.g. prior to exporting to another format, after rotating non-square pixel footage, or after importing from another format)
I have used their plug-ins without any difficulty.
This one costs $2.50.
Terri

What other file format for IDVD project?

hi I have edited hd video files which are Quicktime movies in m-peg2 1920x1080. The files currently put me over the size limit to be able to burn a DVD. I don't want to leave any of the files of of the DVD. My question is what's the next best conversion format I should use so that they all can fit onto my DVD. in other words I want to convert to a smaller size using compressor to fit the idvd project.
Thanks
RD

I advice you to use Brorsoft Video to iDVD Converter.
With it, you can convert video to the best format for burning to iDVD on Mac OS X. iDVD only supports video or image files supported by QuickTime. You can use the tool to convert video to QuickTime MOV file.
Trick:
For best results, in the QuickTime export settings of your video editing application, choose NTSC-DV with a frame rate of 29.97 or PAL-DV with a frame rate of 25. Choose No Compression for audio, and set the sample rate to 48 kilohertz.
Tips:
1. You can drag a QuickTime movie file to the audio well in the Menu Info window or in the slideshow editor. iDVD uses the first audio track in the file as a soundtrack for the menu that is open or for the slideshow and ignores the video. For more information, see Related Topics below.
2. If you share an iMovie HD project as a QuickTime movie using the Full Quality option, iMovie HD doesn’t include chapter markers in the QuickTime movie.

Best Export Format for iDVD to cut down on multiplexing and processing

My processor is what it is and my Ram has been optimized. Is there some video/audio format/ bit rate that will require less time to convert and process?
I understand that MPEG2, mpeg4, H.264, avi, and all seem to take far too long. I prefer using FCPX and Wondershare to do my converting.
Also whenever I have a random burning error its almost always a “multiplexing error” so maybe if I make the “multiplexing” a little easier maybe I can prevent that headache.
Any thoughts about inve$ting in the fastest burners available? Isn’t the actual “burn” process the very last step that usually only takes about 2 minutes anyway?
Thank you in advance!

KidVid wrote:
My processor is what it is and my Ram has been optimized. Is there some video/audio format/ bit rate that will require less time to convert and process?
All depends on what format you need for what purpose. If you need a DVD it'll have to be MPEG-2 or for web use it'll have to be h.264. Other than that there are tons of codecs and containers available. All conversion takes time and to cut down on that time you will need a faster machine.
KidVid wrote:
Also whenever I have a random burning error its almost always a “multiplexing error” so maybe if I make the “multiplexing” a little easier maybe I can prevent that headache.
To avoid burn errors in iDVD create a disk image of your project, test that image file with DVD Player, and, if satisfied, burn with any dedicated disc burning app at no more than 4x to avoid errors.
KidVid wrote:
Any thoughts about inve$ting in the fastest burners available? Isn’t the actual “burn” process the very last step that usually only takes about 2 minutes anyway?
See the speed limit above.

Having trouble converting dvd-rw vr to a format for idvd 3

Hi,
Can anyone tell me how to convert my dvd-rw vr dvd i burned to a format I can edit in either idvd 3 or imovie 3? I have mpeg stream clip but it is a bit confusing for this novice.

What does "vr" refer to? To convert DVD files you'll need to have Apple's mpeg plugin ($20 if you haven't purchased it as part of Apple's pro software, etc.) along with MPEG Streamclip. Here's an article about the alternatives:
Converting Unprotected DVDs
http://www.macworld.com/article/59308/2007/08/sept07mac911.html
You'd be converting the files into a format for iMovie (DV Stream, otherwise known as .dv) if you're wanting to do any editing.
John

Best Movie Format for iDVD

I have several DVDs of children's stories that I am making a backup copy protect the originals. I use iSkysoft DVD Ripper to make a movie & then load this into iDVD to burn.
I tried the Quicktime movie format & that worked fine in iDVD, but the quality was not great. I have the choice in iSkysoft of choosing several formats; QT, MPEGs 1,2 & 4, DV, ASF, & FLV MPEG-4.
I have been experimenting with the MPEGs, but iDVD will not accept them.
What is my best format choice for the best quality DVD from iDVD (I am using Professional Quality encoding)?

You need to convert the VOB files back to DV which iMovie is designed to handle. For that you need mpegStreamclip:
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/video/mpegstreamclip.html
which is free, but you must also have the Apple mpeg2 plugin :
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/mpeg2/
which is a mere $20.
Another possibility is to use DVDxDV:
http://www.dvdxdv.com/NewFolderLookSite/Products/DVDxDV.overview.htm
which costs $25.
For the benefit of others who may read this thread:
Obviously the foregoing only applies to DVDs you have made yourself, or other home-made DVDs that have been given to you. It will NOT work on copy-protected commercial DVDs, which in any case would be illegal.

Format for iDVD

Hi All
I have just finished making a sequence in Final Cut Pro and have burnt a DVD of the QuickTime file outputted by Final Cut.
However although iDVD says that my DVD is finished and in the DVD player connected to the TV all I get is "No Disc Present".
I know that there are problems trying to play QT based files via iDVD and I understand that I may have to convert the QT file using MPEG Streamclip so ... can anyone give me a definative answer : what is the best format to convert the FCP QT file to in order for the DVD to work as advertised!?
Thanking you!

Hi
I do like this
FCE/P to iDVD
Several things
• How to go from FCE/P to iDVD
• Free space on Start-up hard disk
• Encoding
• Brand and type of DVDs used
• Burn speed set
• iDVD BUG
• Chapters
How to go from FCE/P to iDVD I do
• Disable Screen and Energy saver
• IMPORTANT --> FIRST in FinalCut - Mix Down Audio under Sequence Menu / Render Only / Mixdown
• Export out as a QuickTime .mov file
• Select with Mark - Chapter Mark
• Not as Self-Contained (not important but saves time and space)
• NO QUICKTIME CONVERSION (IMPORTANT)
This QT.mov file I import into iDVD from within iDVD.
Free space on Start-up hard disk
I set a minimum of 25GB (for Mac OS and iDVDs temp files)
Encoding
• I use Pro Quality encoding
Brand and type of DVDs used
• I use only Verbatim
• I use DVD-R
Burn speed set
• I set down this to x4 (or x1)
iDVD BUG
• One can not go back to movie-project for any alterations and then go back to
the iDVD project. It will notice and ask You to either Up-date or Cancel. Neither
of them will work.
Medicine - Start a brand new iDVD project. (or trash movie in iDVD and clear Media assetts) (I start a brand new project)
Use of Chapters
• I only use a to z and 0 to 9 in naming them. NO other symbol/letter !
• NO Chapter-mark at very beginning - iDVD NEEDS TO set this by it self
• No Chapter marks in or within two seconds from a transition
(Way around this last one - Export movie as QT full quality and NO Chapter marks
Import this into a new Movie-project and now You are free to set C-Ms where You want
them except at very beginning - still)
Material used to build movie
• video - I use streamingDV (or convert all other to this eg .mp4, .avi, .wmv etc)
• audio - I use .aiff 16-bit 48kHz or from Audio-CD (44.1kHz) - no .mp3 or direct from iTunes
• photos - I use .jpg - no .bmp etc
Trash iDVD pref file and run Repair Permissions - and have a re-try.
from post ??
May not be relevant, but I had the same problem with iDVD, where burned DVDs showed a green screen. It was cured by quitting Quicksilver and Quickeys as well as disabling sleep and screensaving
Yours Bengt W

What format for .mts videofiles?

Hi, I have a lot of .mts videofiles I would like to wrap into one big file in cs6. What format/container should I use to store lossless, or will there always be a loss in picture quality when storing files in cs6?
kindly

I had to look up mts, I knew I heard of it before, just wasn't clicking. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.mts
Anyway, mpg is a lossy format in that each time you save to that format the more it will degrade.
There is no such thing as storing files in CS6. You can use any number of apps in the suite to create a video file though.
So the question comes down to what formats {wrapper/codec} is lossless - saving repeatedly to same format without any loss of data or color information.
AVI with no codec or MOV with no codec are at the top of the list, but because they are not using a codec the file is not compressed and therefore will take up a lot of drive space and can run slower.
There are codecs that are lossless though but you could be trading smaller files for the lack of transpaerency.
So really the answer is up to you, try out some of the formats with the various codecs on a sample video and see what provides the best compromise. Then way that with the length of your video.
Also do a web search and see if anything is on the market that would be worth purchasing, cause you never know what latest breakthough will save the day.

My podcasts what format for use with iPod

I have my own website www.chumlordfishing.com and I do instructional podcasts, so far every podcast needs to be converted in iTunes to play on my and others iPods. What format will allow the podcasts to be played without needing to be converted. Additionally, they don't show up in my iPod under podcasts once converted. They show up under videos.
Thanks for the help!!!

Intel processor in you MB Pro? Need it to capture avchd.
regarding file size and the need for external drive:
"AVCHD output files are about 120Mb per minute of footage. The converted output file will be about four times the size of the input. This is because AVCHD is a highly compressed HD format and we are uncompressing it into a Quicktime-friendly high definition format. Our example 1 minute AVCHD clip becomes about 500Mb in size, after conversion.
The final size of a converted clip has a lot to do with the amount of movement in the clip. A lot of movement will mean a larger file. Action clips can be as high as 7 times the size of the raw clips."

What formatting for external hard drives for my photo students?

I teach digital photography. Our classroom Macs are a mix of Intel and PPC (iMac 20", G5s). My students typically either come with a Mac laptop, buy one while here, or soon after they leave. Some (few!) have a PC laptop or will leave to go home to a PC laptop.
I've been buying one external harddrive per student (with FW800, FW400, USB 2.0, 250 GB) from macsales.com for students to put their digital photos on while here and when they leave my 12 wk. course. I encourage them if they have a Mac laptop to partition their external drive to have one partition for backing up their boot drive, one for their photos.
In the classroom, they may be hooking up their external drive to a PPC or Intel Mac.
What recommendations can you give for what formatting they should be using for their external drives? Intel, for PPC, or...MS-DOS (if they go to a PC)? (One student told me that her external drive which was formated for PPC last summer now won't show up on her MacBook Pro.)
I realize they can only use the FW800 on a few Macs (including 17" MacBook Pro, Mac Pro), and should not be using USB 2.0 for a drive they hope to boot a Mac with. I've heard formatting and using MS-DOS is very unstable (for PCs at least).
Tips, please?
2x2.66 GHz Mac Pro Mac OS X (10.4.9) 5 GB RAM

I've been buying one external harddrive per student
(with FW800, FW400, USB 2.0, 250 GB) from
macsales.com for students to put their digital photos
on while here and when they leave my 12 wk. course. I
encourage them if they have a Mac laptop to partition
their external drive to have one partition for
backing up their boot drive, one for their photos.
That's impressive and very user-supportive. At work, our students have space on our server to backup/store their work for the semester but are greatly encouraged to backup their stuff with either Cds or DVDs (and we don't supply those). If they use a personal machine, they are responsible for their own backups of their system.
In the classroom, they may be hooking up their
external drive to a PPC or Intel Mac.
For data, the traditional APM formatted drive work with both.
What recommendations can you give for what formatting
they should be using for their external drives?
Intel, for PPC, or...MS-DOS (if they go to a PC)?
(One student told me that her external drive which
was formated for PPC last summer now won't show up
on her MacBook Pro.)
As I mentioned earlier, an Intel Mac can boot from an APM formatted drive although this may or may not be the best solution. Unfortunately with partitioning via Disk Utility (and perhaps other tools as well - I've not investigated this yet), every partition must be of the same scheme GUID or APM.
The most important reason for backups (IMHO) is to safeguard personal work. The OS can be re-installed anytime and settings reconfigured if need be. Since the APM scheme can be used by both Intels and PPC for data, I would go with APM. Bootable or not, their important data will be backed up.
(I don't know why one student had a problem but it shouldn't be related to the partition scheme.)
For a bootable system/backup, I use Carbon Copy Cloner from Mike Bombich. Ideally, so long as there is space, I create a restorable image of a fresh OS install and put it away for a rainy day. I then clone my entire internal drive to the external (APM). Over the last year, I've been able to boot from it on my original iMac CD as well as have a hard copy of my work.
Once backed up, I would later use the option to only copy changed files instead of re-doing the entire drive. That was a feature in the PPC version of the app (which will run under Intel) although I haven't tried the latest universal version (3.0 beta). There are a number of other applications that can perform backups/cloning as well.

Movie formatting for iDVD 4

I'm trying to burn a DVD with some videos from my digital camera using iDVD 4. The videos were automatically transferred to my computer as MPEG-1 files, but neither iDVD nor iMovie will accept that format. Does anyone know how I can change the format of the videos for iDVD (preferably without spending money)? Is there a good web page with a program and instructions that someone would recommend? Any help is greatly appreciated!
PowerBook G4 Mac OS X (10.1.x)

welcome egd2001 to the  boards of discussions ...
.. ehm, you need 'a little' background knowledge, to understand why this is no trivia task...:
* a TV has a standard, fixed resolution of 720x480 pixel.. your mpegs have a quarter of that.. => poor quality...
* TV has 30 frames per second.. => I'm pretty sure, your mpegs not..
* iM/iDVD are intended to work with miniDV camcorders, both apps work with the same video codec, dv, to import 'lossless' ..
* mpegs are a playback format.. any conversion/processing adds a loss of pic quality, due to the techniqué used for compression ...
* this playback format muxxes audio+video into a data stream, both a 'woven together' ... not easy to seperate that...
Mpeg Streamclip
www.squared5.com
allows to open and convert mpeg1 into 'dv-stream' (look into SC's many export options...) ...
as said, you will realize a (dramatic) loss of pic quality ... due to used formats & standards...

What format for video in Ipod touch?

What format do I need to convert my movies to so I can copy them from Itunes to Ipod touch? They are all there in video section of Itunes, but when I try and sync them to Ipod, it tells me they aren't supported my Ipod. Any thoughts?
JP

From the apple web site:
H.264 video, up to 1.5 Mbps, 640 by 480 pixels, 30 frames per second, Low-Complexity version of the H.264 Baseline Profile with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats; H.264 video, up to 2.5 Mbps, 640 by 480 pixels, 30 frames per second, Baseline Profile up to Level 3.0 with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats; MPEG-4 video, up to 2.5 Mbps, 640 by 480 pixels, 30 frames per second, Simple Profile with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats
Probably doesn't help you, but there are many video converters out there that have ipod touch / iphone profiles, etc, that will chose the right settings for you. A quick google should help

What format for films does an ipod touch use

I have an ipod touch 4g 64gb
I want to convert films to watch on it, so what format am I looking for and how would I change the format ?
I have prism and Magic film converters, but they put them in what I thought was the right format, but it comes up with 'cant be played on this ipod'
so what format do I use ?
Thanks

From the 4G tech specs:
TV and Video
H.264 video up to 720p, 30 frames per second, Main Profile level 3.1 with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats
MPEG-4 video up to 2.5 Mbps, 640 by 480 pixels, 30 frames per second, Simple Profile with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps per channel, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats
Motion JPEG (M-JPEG) up to 35 Mbps, 1280 by 720 pixels, 30 frames per second, audio in ulaw, PCM stereo audio in .avi file format

What format for my HD

I just bought a d2 Lacie external hd for my powerbook so that i can fit all those videos... i wanted to know what format i should put the external hd in... i would like to be able to use it with windows computers but if there is a big differance then i can sacrifice it...
Thanks, Phil

Phillip
External drives should be Mac OS Extended with Journaling off.
I'm pretty sure you can make a partition and assign that to IBM windows format.
This may prove helpful:
http://www.kenstone.net/fcphomepage/partitioningtiger.html
Al

What format for saving files for idvd

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