Digital 8 mm to DVD Question

in iPod + iTunes + AppleTV edited January 2014
I will likely be switching to the Mac platform soon. Am planning on purchasing a new flat panel iMac once they are updated in the next couple of weeks.

Planning on doing a decent amount of importing of Digital 8 mm footage, editing it, and burning it to DVD.

I have two questions:

First, if one chooses to burn the DVD using the best quality of video available, how many minutes of video will an Apple CD-R hold? (I seem to be getting different answers from different sources on this.)

Second, I am confused somewhat by all of the terminology relating to the factors which affect the final video quality on the DVD.

In a nutshell, if I use the iMac and the new versions of iMovie and iDVD included in the upcoming iLife software, will that give me the best video quality available currently from Apple?

Or is that quality affected by editing software? (Would Final Cut Pro or Final Cut Express yield better quality video?) Or is the best quality of video available affected by the DVD authoring software? (Would DVD Studio Pro help to produce a higher quality video output to DVD?)

How do Quicktime Pro and the different MPEG versions play into all of this?

I guess all I really need to know is....If I get the new iMac with iLife and burn DVD's with that, will I be missing out on some other software, etc. that would help me to yiled higher quality video on DVD's?

Thanks for the help!


  • Reply 1 of 8
    elricelric Posts: 230member
    Ok, I got the 17" iMac and a Canon ZR50. I dont see much if any differance from the final dvd and the film.

    Ok, iDVD wants you to only put 60 minutes of video on a dvd but you can put more. When you go over 60 minutes it has to use a different compression so the quality goes down a bit. Viewed on the computer you can see the difference but when viewed with a dvd player on an old standard tv (non-hdtv) i really can't tell much at all.

    Now I know what your gonna say, movies you rent are almost always longer than 60 minutes and they always look great. Well the reason for this is there is more than one type of dvd disk. Consumer grade disks are 4.7 gig disks, most movies are on 8 gig disks.

    I'm sure final cut pro will give you lots more features and if you are a student you can get the educational price on it which is about the same as the new final cut lite or whatever they are calling it. I plan on getting final cut pro one day but till then iMovie does a pretty good job, then again I'm not doing anything fancy with it nor have I tried to.
  • Reply 2 of 8
    objra10objra10 Posts: 679member
    First of all, FCX is out because it only does DV (miniDV, DVCAM, DVCPRO). You won't be able to do Digital8mm with that setup. imovie will do what you want, and you can even export chapter markers, but your editing options will be very limited.

    Now, as for iDVD. It's a great little program that is very good at what it does. For under 60min, you get 9.67MB/s which is actually higher than most consumer DVD's you buy in the store. At 60min+ you drop to 4.8MB/s which is still not bad. You're not starting with a very high quality tape medium so you won't notice as much as if you used DV or film.

    iLife will do what you want it to, but you will be limited in the long run. If you can afford it, get FCP3. iDVD is fine, just break things up if it's too long.
  • Reply 3 of 8
    When you export video to a DVD, you're exporting in MPEG-2. In terms of going to DVD, MPEG-2 is your only option. Based on how much video you're putting on the disc determines the data rate, and in turn, the resolution. The reason the software you'll find for X that burns DVDs won't burn a feature film is because movies on DVDs are written onto two layers of the disc. To the best of my knowledge, the SuperDrive cannot burn dual layer discs, hence the limitations.

    In terms of editing software, Final Cut Pro and a mac out of the box can input video from anything with FireWire output so long as it is a supported camera. If you have analog outputs, you'd need a video card or junction box to pull the video into the machine. Look at spending multiple hundreds of dollars for this. As long as you can get video into the machine, Final Cut and Final Cut Express can deal with it, as they'll both deal with normal QuickTime files IIRC. I'm sure iMovie will as well.
  • Reply 4 of 8
    Thanks for the replies so far!

    OBJRA10 and others, I will be shooting the video with my Digital 8 mm Sony camcorder which is a large segment of what Sony is still selling in the canmcorder area. The unit has a FireWire output slot. Are you saying that after exporting it to the iMac, I could only use iMovie and/or Final Cut Pro but not Final Cut Express? I thought that since it was digital output that all three software packages would be able to import and be used to edit the video. <img src="confused.gif" border="0">
  • Reply 5 of 8
    According to Apple's spec, FCX will only handle QT DV codec files. It is a capturing issue. You could always capture through iMovie, save as a QT and then import into FCX.
  • Reply 6 of 8
    [quote]Originally posted by OBJRA10:

    <strong>According to Apple's spec, FCX will only handle QT DV codec files. It is a capturing issue. You could always capture through iMovie, save as a QT and then import into FCX.</strong><hr></blockquote>

    Actually, according to Apple's <a href=""; target="_blank">FCX compatibility list</a>, FCX is compatible with at least two models of Digital 8 camcorders, the DCR-TRV120 and DCR-TRV230. I suspect it'll work with just about any model as Digitial 8, like miniDV, uses DV25.
  • Reply 7 of 8
    Thanks for the assistance!!
  • Reply 8 of 8
    eugeneeugene Posts: 8,254member
    Elric, most 2 hour movie tracks actually fit on a single sided 4.7 GB disc. The MPEG-2 in the DVD movies you buy is encoded between 5-6 megabit...iDVD uses lazier compression to cut down on encoding time.
Sign In or Register to comment.