[MacDV] Re: archiving footage on DVD

[Laine Lee]

If you find that the video you want to take to DVD is over 2 hours in length
once you have it digitized, you might be interested in my method of using
iMovie 4 and iDVD 4 to split the video into two parts, then recombine the
parts after they are encoded.

http://lonestar.utsa.edu/llee/idvd.html

I've become too impatient to wait on ffmpegX or Transcoder to reduce the
encoded mpeg files to a size that will fit on a single standard blank DVD,
so I bought DVD2One to shrink the final VIDEO_TS folder after the two
projects are recombined. Still it can be done for free if you are stubborn.
I've used the method dozens of times. I just did it again a couple of days
ago after I recorded a broadcast of "Some Like It Hot" which totaled just
under 2 hours 2 minutes. It seems that the real key to combining the mpeg
output of iDVD is to remove the last 5 bytes of all but the ending file of
the pair (or series) of mpeg files you're trying to combine. There's
something about the last 5 bytes of the mpeg files generated by iDVD that
won't let multiplexing (combining audio with video) continue with any mpeg
tools I have found. Anyway my article includes a script that does the job
and explains each step thoroughly. The resulting video is absolutely
unmarked at the seams, unless you opt to put a chapter there with Sizzle.


-- 
Laine Lee
llee at lonestar.utsa.edu
http://lonestar.utsa.edu/llee