[G4] Possible solution to iMovie and iDVD problem

[Eric Buczynski]

I don't think it's the older Operating System you have that's the
problem.  There's a choice you can make in iDVD preferences that will
allow you to make a 60-minute or 90-minute DVD.  There's "Best Quality"
which will take a longer time for the iDVD program to compile everything
and burn it but will allow you to create a DVD up to 90-minutes in
length, or there's "Best Performance" which will  take a shorter time to
compile but will only allow you to make a DVD up to 60 minutes in
length.  Even if you select Best Quality and your movie is 1.5 hours in
length, you may have to trim out some things if you have an opening menu
that has animations and/or music set to it.  You can do that or choose a
main menu that is non-animating and does not have music set to it.  I
have a G4 Digital Audio upgraded to 1.2Ghz with 1.5 Gigs of RAM, and it
still takes a long time for DVDs to burn.  It's true that you do need a
lot of RAM for iMovie and iDVD, but it's the processor that does allthe
work when it comes to compiling the animated menus and such before
burning the DVD.

Eric

Hi all -

My Dad has a iMac G4 with 60GB HD and 512MB RAM. We have 1.5 hrs. video
footage to make into a DVD, but neither of us has done this before. I
checked with a friend about how much footage would import at one swoop,
and he said that amount would be ok.

One other thing: Dad has OS10.1 and I haven't been able to get him to
upgrade! Maybe some of this is due to that ... Also, all versions of
iMovie and iDVD are from that era also - it is iDVD2 tho.

We imported the footage into iMovie and exported as DVD. It has been
six hours and it says 19 hours to go? Any ideas? Initially said it
would be 300 minutes.

We did a successful experiment with a 1-minute clip and took that .mov
file into iDVD and successfully burned a disk which played on the DVD
player. So it must be too much footage?

Any ideas?

Anne Keller Smith
Down to Earth Web Design
-- 
  Eric Buczynski
  emaxxx4 at warpmail.net