Any iMovie gurus out there? Help!

[TJinLOCA]

Hey all,

My teenage daughter has a huge school project that's due in 7 hours, and we're having no luck at all with iMovie HD on our iMac. She has a 15-minute movie project that needs to be burned to a disc to show on a PC in her classroom tomorrow - er - later today, and nothing we try will work.

Does anyone have experience with iMovie and know what settings to use that will produce a watchable file that can be burned to a disc? We've tried the following:

1) Saving to a .wmv format (since the file has to be playable on the PC in her classroom). Result is in the correct aspect ratio (1920x1080) but will not play once it gets past the opening credits - it freezes when the actual video footage appears.

2) Burning a DVD directly from the iMovie project in iDVD. The preview looks less than wonderful, but at least it's the right aspect ratio. The machine hangs up when finalizing the burned disc, though, and the disc is unreadable.

3) Saving to a .mov file, using the settings recommended on this page. This results in the error "The movie could not be properly compressed. It may contain data that is invalid for the type of compression selected." Other settings produce a file that's either too jerky to watch, or is in 4:3 ratio instead of the proper widescreen.

She's killed herself for over a week on this thing, and it's incredibly frustrating to be so close to finished and be completely stuck like this. Any help would be appreciated (soon!!)

Thanks.

 

[Guartho]

Downconverting from HD to DVD takes a long time, especially on older hardware. What kind of Mac are you doing this on? iDVD was probably not hung. It probably was just still working.

Unfortunately I have a lot of ideas, but none that will really help you in time. At this point your best bet is probably to take your Mac in and play it directly from iMovie.

Hmmm.. on re-reading I see that you say it hangs in the finalization process. If that's accurate and iDVD made it past the multiplexing stage you may be able to salvage this... I'm writing a little tutorial on disc images and burning with disk utility now.

 

[Guartho]

Ok. Now, this is a big if and the likelihood of success depends on a lot of luck and the answers to very specific questions that we don't have and determining them for certain would take longer than just plain trying it. I'm hoping that iDVD has already encoded your DVD files and is just having a glitch with the burner. I'm hoping we can bypass this with Disk utility. Here goes....

First create a disc image instead of burning from iDVD. A disc image is just a file that is a perfect virtual copy of your DVD. To make a disc image in iDVD Select File -> Save as Disc Image instead of clicking the big burn button.

You'll get the standard save file window. Pay attention to where you save the file. It's probably easiest to just stick it on the desktop.

This is where 50% of the luck comes in. If you've led a good life and given plenty of money to charity this part won't take long because iDVD did the hard work last time and was able to retain its scratch files. (one way to tell ahead of time is if your iDVD project file is very large, in the case of a 15 minute movie very large would be 500-600 megabytes, but a full length DVD project would be more like 3.5-4.7 gigabytes.)

Once your disc image is made you'll want to open Disk Utility. Disk utility is a very useful app that comes as part of OSX. It's in the Utilities folder of your Applications folder. It's used for all kinds of thing related to disks and discs, including copying and burning using disc images.

When disk utility is open take note that all hard disks and optical discs and drives attached to your system are listed in a column on the left. Go to the desktop (or wherever you saved your .img disc image file) and drag your disc image into the white area at the bottom of that list. Make sure your disc image is selected, (highlighted in blue) like this:

...and then click the burn button.

You'll get a basic burn dialog that looks like this:

But if you click the blue triangle in the upper right corner you can get some more options like this:

(Note that the computer I made this tutorial on does not actually have a DVD burner so it says "combo drive" at the top. I wouldn't actually be able to do the next step on this computer.)

Once you've put in a blank DVD-R and the computer spins it up and recognizes it as blank you'll be able to select the burn speed. I recommend setting the slowest burn speed your drive supports for maximum reliability, but you're in a pinch and should be just fine if you burn at whatever speed the disc packaging says it's rated at. (probably 4x or 8x.)

Here's the other 50% of the luck. If you've made it this far, it's still possible that the iDVD issue was not iDVD's fault, but a problem with your burner. If the problem is with your burner then it will rear its ugly head once again some time during this stage. Good luck!

Oh, and if you do make it this far, but can't burn, you can double-click the disc image to mount it and then open the DVD player app. Your disc image will act just like a real DVD. Of course, if you've got to play it off the Mac like that you'll want to play it from iMovie so it'll be in HD.

 

[the Dagman]

I have never been all that impressed with the compression options with iMovie, yet I still use it all the time.

What I do is export the movie after editing into the .dv format, which is the same format used raw by iMovie, so there is no compression. From there I open the .dv file in Quicktime Pro and export it to the desired file type, along with my specified aspect ratio. I have found that the .m4v format, the "iPod" setting, compresses it quite nicely with minimal artifacts. At least on my 3 year old iMac. With this format you could burn the finished compressed video as a data file to a CD and open it on a PC with WMV without any problems.

 

[Guartho]

Your raw footage will look just as good that way, but your titles, effects, and transitions will suffer from being compressed to .dv. I'm not sure what other options you have out of iMovie, but you should get better results from using uncompressed, or other lossless or near-lossless codecs. Of course, that eats a lot of HD space which may not be an option, even temporarily.

 

[TJinLOCA]

Thanks so much, Guartho and Dagman! I appreciate all the information.

I was finally able to get it to burn the DVD direct in iDVD direct from iMovie. It took forever to render (it was HD video) but it looked great when it finished ... hours later.

Another problem I was having with producing a .wmv file is that the Mac to Windows conversion software we have (Flip4Mac) was the trial version, and would only convert the first 30 seconds of video. Luckily I was able to download the full version and run it again, and I finally ended up with a completely Windows-compatible file that looked pretty good (but the DVD looked even better!)

I hope my daughter now knows better than to leave this sort of thing until the night before it's due. She really owes me now.

 

[Small White Car]

I hope my daughter now knows better than to leave this sort of thing until the night before it's due. She really owes me now.

Well see, she learned the most valuable lesson of all!

You can feel good knowing that I've spent sleepless nights messing with similar problems (just on a larger scale).

Let me tell you, having a $1,500 computer or a $15,000 computer doesn't really change that. With video, it's gonna happen from time to time! So it's not just you.

Glad you got it worked out.

I have never been all that impressed with the compression options with iMovie, yet I still use it all the time.

What I do is export the movie after editing into the .dv format, which is the same format used raw by iMovie, so there is no compression. From there I open the .dv file in Quicktime Pro and export it to the desired file type

If you go to SHARE -> EXPORT USING QUICKTIME, and then set the setting to MOVIE to QUICKTIME MOVIE and click 'Options' then you get the same thing without the extra step. It will bring up the Quicktime settings right there.

(At least, in the most current iMovie. I can't promise it for all the past versions.)