Reading and Writing MPEG2's / DVD Question

[Grafixgibs]

I have a G3 with an external DVD burner and premier 6. I was wondering if it is possible to create a DVD using this set up. Or if it is possible to make an MPG2, save it to DVD/cd and play it back on the computer. I do Video editing at work and the managers would like to be able to have high quality video play back from their laptops, so I am trying to figure out how to do this. I have tried VCD but on the monitors it is really fuzzy and pixilated. Do you know how I could fix this?

Thanks for any and all information you can give.


Grafixgibs

[JHebert]

You should also post in the Mac forum to get more replies.

If you have an external DVD burner for your Mac I assume its in a Firewire enclosure. You need some type of DVD authoring software to encode/author/burn DVDs and for the Mac the main options are iDVD or DVD Studio Pro from Apple. To my knowledge iDVD only supports internal IDE versions of the SuperDrive (Pioneer A04/104). There was a Firewire enabler iDVD plugin from a company called OWC. It was pulled from the market after Apple threatened to sue but you may find it on the web. DVD Studio Pro can work with an external drive but its a more expensive and complicated app than iDVD. Your users would need DVD player software or at least an MPEG-2 codec installed on their laptops to view the video. I'm not sure if iDVD or DVD Studio Pro would let you save an MPEG-2 file on a regular data CD-R, but if so that might be another good option.

Also consider alternatives to DVD. If your users just want to view video on a laptop you could output to QuickTime MOV files instead of DVD, using either Sorenson or MPEG-4 codecs. This would give you high quality and smaller file sizes than MPEG-2 on DVD, and you would be able to burn your videos on regular data CD-R instead of DVD. This would be an advantage if your users don't all have DVD-ROM drives on their laptops. However they would all need to have QuickTime installed on their systems. This is a given for Mac Powerbooks but may be a hassle for PC laptops.

[Grafixgibs]

I have an external firewire DVD and use toast to burn right now. I have tried to save the file for quicktime but I always run into the image being fuzzy and not very good on the monitor so I was wondering if mpeg2 would take care of this. I don't really want to author a DVD with the menus and all just something with that quality that will look good on full screen when playing.

[tgpo]

Moved you to the Mac Forum.