[MacDV] Burning DVD's - 3 Macs at once

[Erica Sadun]

At 6:08 AM -0600 12/25/03, R B Williams wrote:
>Merry Christmas to All !
>
>There are some details I'd love to get a handle on as I
>approach the end of a long editing project. It is living in
>iMovie 3 and will be right at an hour in length.
>
>1) I've seen postings about the point where the iMovie
>program downgrades quality in order to fit on a DVD (an
>hour?)  I don't want to hit that wall. How do I know where
>that moment is? Length, size, what???

DVDs *always* downgrade quality. It's the standard
MPEG-2 compression.

Digital video (DV) occupies (approx) 13 gig an hour.

You can stick about an hour at most at best quality on
a DVD without exceeding the maximum instanteous bitrate.
So at best quality, a DVD stores about 1 hour in 4.7 gig.

Further, DV itself is already compressed at 5:1.

Compression is just a thing you have to deal with when
you work with digital video.

Alternately, there's film.


>3) My habit has been to burn a rewritable disc to view and
>check for any issues. After all is right, I make a DVD-r
>version. That means encoding the project twice. Has anyone
>tried making a disc image from an rw that will then burn
>DVD-r's ?

Just make an image and burn from there.

-- Erica