iDVD - black sheep of the iLife suite

I am using imovie 9 and trying to prepare my 45 minute video for idvd.
AFter an hour of preparing, in the last minute it get the 2125 error message.
Very frustrating.' When I used imovie 6 and made a movie of siilar length, I had no problem.

Hi,

iDVD also changes 4:3 films and stretches them into 16:9. Then they look rubbish. In this case you need to change the aspect ratio of the movie.
A simple program that can do this for you is:
Anamorphizer
http://homepage.mac.com/sith33/FileSharing34.html

Incredible that Apple hasn't built that in. It is extremely annoying to make a movie and after hours of rendering the DVD comes out wrongly... At least with Anamorphizer this can be corrected.

As Apple always touts how easy things are with the Mac... well, with iDVD it is pretty difficult to get everything right. Often one needs to go back and redo the entire project. In terms of ease of use and power to adapt a project to the user's preferences, iDVD can be optimised a lot!

Dan.

RTFM

I find iDVD a dream to use. A bit tedious maybe, but for the money it is a joy to use if you don' t need professional results for which you would use DVD Studio Pro.

And as far as the audio volume is concerned, if you had taken the trouble to read the manual, you would have noticed, that you can adjust the volume in iMovie quite easily.

I wonder why you expect to be a pro at using a program when you use it for the first time. And when the results are not what you expect you blame the program instead of your lack of patience and expertise.

iDVD is a great little program, and yes, it has it's limitations. If you want more, get Final Cut Studio, and you'll really have something to complain about. Not because it's bad, but because of the complexity and steep learning curve, something which you do not seem to have patience for.

I recently used iDVD for the first time last week and found it to be rather nice. By no means perfect but it did what i wanted and converted my video and burned 70mins of content in just over an hour on my little aluminum Mac Book( which is about 4 hours faster than my dell). I found the premade menus to be much nicer than nero.

If you didn't know that you can't exceed the time limit when in video format you must not do this very often, that right there is DVD 101. This is why CD players that read mp3 data disc's were popular, you could put hundreds of songs rather than 80 minutes.

The program can improve, but in this case so could the user.

A few other tips and a couple of comments:

1. Make sure you have plenty of free space on your startup drive, as iDVD needs temp space before creating the actual disc image that will be burned to your DVD.

2. iMovie 9 is great for quick edits that you need to do; FCE is even better, but takes time to master.

3. for iDVD, make a disc image first so it can be saved. Burning directly to disc will mostly be a disappointment until you get the hang of things.

I have edited and burned quite a few lacrosse game discs this year, and have had my share of problems due to the short time frames involved, and my learning curve. It is rare now that I have any problems. iMovie 9 is great for these. Also helpful is Turbo HD from El Gato, as iMovie can take considerable time making the QT reference movie - sure it is not an automatic link to iDVD, but time saving when working with HDV. My workflow: iMovie9 -> export using Turbo HD for the refernece movie -> iDVD. Saves a few hours on my Macbook Pro.

If I don't need the iDVD themes, taking the QT reference movie over to my Q600/Vista PC and using Sony's DVD Architect speeds things up considerably, and the DVD quality is also quite good. Even better is it's ability to make Blu-ray discs with menus for HD video. YEs, Toast can do some of this, but not nearly as fast, since the Turbo HD does not help with DVD mastering (DVDs require MPEG-2, and Turbo HD only outputs H.264.

One common theme in many "complaint reviews" is that the writer simply does not have the time to read the documentation, experiment to get more proficient, and then reflect how they got from start to finish. Their reviews could be better if they had a frame of reference to other tools to make a more comparative review.

There are many video editing tools and DVD authoring tools available to Mac and PC users. iMovie and iDVD are some of the most cost effective tools for the average user. Perfect? No way, but pretty good none the less.

iMovie 08 and 09 are not designed for professionals to edit a Hollywood movie. They are designed for the amateur family videographer who wants a simple intuitive video editing program. It was designed to edit, title and have fun with small video projects without having previous video editing experience or special expertise. It's a different paradigm then the older version of iMovie. The same theory applies to iDVD. It was not designed to produce video store ready DVDs on your Mac.

I have edited, with iMovie 08 and burned DVDs with iDVD 08, many home movies without any problems. It takes a few hours to render the video into a DVD or disk image on my G5 iMac because it is not a professional video editing work station. If you want to do more with video editing, then buy Final Cut Express and a Mac Pro. If you want to go to Hollywood and become a professional movie editor, then buy the full version of Final Cut Studio, a Mac Pro and then enroll in a film or video program at a university like UCLA. Otherwise, just have some fun with your home video and realize the limitations of the iLife suite.

Did you miss the video tutorials?
http://www.apple.com/findouthow/movies/imovie08.html
http://www.apple.com/findouthow/movies/idvd.html
It's a poor workman who blames his tools.

as a redhead - f u.

insensitivity and ignorance uggh.

I love iDVD! I use it all the time and create large projects. It always works well for me. The one trick I suggest is burn to disc image and nit directly to disc. Toasts menus languish way behind iDVD. I have toast as well.

So you try to create a DVD and did not take the time to do a small amount of homework before you started. The colors being "off", I guess you don't know how to adjust the gamma on your Mac make to match TV. The load menu volume? maybe you should have reviewed the properties for the music, the you would have noticed the volume control. If you are going to write a review about a product at least take a bit of time to learn it instead of whining about it, and declaring it not worth the effort to use. It works fine, if you take the time to learn it. If you don't want to do that hire someone else to do it for you.