VideoHelp Forum
+ Reply to Thread
Results 1 to 3 of 3
Thread
  1. If you can help me with this, I will adore you and do you personal favors. I am so stumped.

    So I have a huge (3 hour, 4GB) .avi file. It's DivX.
    I want to get it into iDVD and cut it up into chapters and make a nice menu and make a DVD out of it.

    This is where it gets annoying.
    In the finder's preview pane, and in QuickTime, it says the file is 480x576, and that's how it plays it. In VLC and mplayer, though, it plays the file as 1024x576, which is how it should look. Although it plays correctly, in the properties window, VLC reports the resolution of the video stream as 480x576.

    I have QT Pro, so I merely opened the .avi in QT, changed the video attributes to make the resolution correct, and then saved a new file. The finder preview and QT now both have the dimensions as 1024x576 (correct) and it plays fine in QT. However, when I import the adjusted movie (now a .mov) into iMovie 5, the converted file is squished again, with black bars on the left and right.

    So, my question is, how do I get it to look right in iMovie, or how do accomplish my task without iMovie?

    Thank you so much if you can help. I really appreciate it.

    PS: here's a link to a sample .mov that iMovie screws up when importing: option click to download[/url]
    Quote Quote  
  2. If you do not strictly need chapter markers than you can skip the time and picture loss of a DV encode. iDVD 5 will accept widescreen content, but you need to set the proper flag. Use the handy Applescript Anomorphiciser to set it and you can drag and drop the referrence movie into iDVD as anamorphic widescreen content. It will encode to a 720 wide standard picture but you get iDVD's menus and you you won't waste bits in your mpeg encode on black letterbox bars.

    Notice the "Widescreen Preview" marking.
    Unfortunately iDVD has problem setting the proper flags for set-top players. To get around this, save the project as a disc image and mount it. Drag out the VIDEO_TS and use MyDVDEdit to set the proper aspect ratio in the IFO file. Select 16:9 Auto Letterbox and burn the new Video_TS in Toast.

    METHOD 2-
    If you MUST use iMovie HD make sure you set the proper project type.

    Then export to a stand-alone movie for editing. If you need quality choose Animation for lossless or the new H.264 set to Best if space is important. Import the new standalone and you can edit away and set your chapter markers.
    Quote Quote  
  3. I really do want chapters. That's pretty much the point of putting this on DVD.

    I created a new 1080i project like you said, but importing the .mov still squishes it. When I export that .mov to Animation, then iMovie imports it correctly, but why do I have to go through this extra step? Is this a bug in iMovie? I'm guessing quality will suffer when iMovie re-encodes the file into Apple Intermediate Codec, too, huh?

    Ok, well last night it occured to me that I could use QT Pro to cut up the DivX file into smaller files. Now I have 20 .mov (DivX) files, and I want to use them as chapters in iDVD. Is this possible?
    Quote Quote  



Similar Threads

Visit our sponsor! Try DVDFab and backup Blu-rays!