Titanium 5.2 vs. iMovie

[AlecWest]

In the subject area, I use the word "vs." for a reason. I'm normally a PC user but, yesterday, helped a Mac friend install Toast 5.2 Titanium. He's used iMovie for a while now but decided he wanted to make and burn his own VCDs. He's got a G4 with a 25-gig spill-drive for his video work and runs OS 9.2.2 with 704 megs RAM. After a day/night/day of trial and error, unistalling/reinstalling OS's and utilities, it finally half-works. He can make a VCD from his iMovie files ... but when he tries to change a QuickTime MOV file into a VCD, it goes about 3/4 the way through -- then the file (ulp) vanishes!

I've visited both Roxio's Toast discussion forum and Apple's iMovie discussion forum. And, all I see there is a lot of angst regarding the compatability between Toast 5 and iMovie. I'm hoping that most people don't have this problem ... but my friend is tearing his hair out. And, after this experience, I'm glad I have a PC (grin).

But the question is this. Is there ANYTHING out there for the Mac that resembles the Dazzle DVC capture utility I use on my PC ... hardware and software that allows Mac users to convert inputted signals direct to MPEG1 on the fly???

[jchansen]

There are hardware solutions, but I would just like to mention that Toast gives really bad video cds. It would be best to export from imovie as if for iDvd (which is just high-quality DV) and then use something like Afropic, ffmpegX, or mediapipe, all of which are discussed in this forum frequently. If you take that exported DV file, you should be able to drop this onto Toast to make a video cd. This may beat the problem you have, rather than exporting to VCD directly from imovie. Maybe.