Problems encoding in iDVD 4

[macmelly]

Hi everyone,

I'm hoping someone out there can help me. I've created a project with one 1 hour long feature, a slideshow (4 mins) and a 20 minute feature. I have iDVD set to best quality rather than best performance (because it's over 60 mins). Every time I have tried to burn the movie, not only does it take over 6 hours, it doesn't encode properly. The last two times I have got the following error:

'The recording device reported the illegal request: Buffer underrun. (0x21, 0x02.)'

Do i need to free up some disk space? Any suggestions? Is my movie too long?

Thanks in advance...here are my specs:

Powermac G4 1.25Ghz
768 MB
OSX 10.2.6
Pioneer DVD-RW DVDR-105
iDVD v 4

Mel

[willrob]

The length of time is consistant with what I've experienced with iDVD 4 for projects close to 2 hours at Best Performance. The Buffer Underrun may be a media error, or a fragmented hard drive issue. basically it means the data is being delivered to the writer at a rate that doesn't sync with the writing (typically too slow transfers). If your hard drive is very fragmented the DVD project may be fragmented as well. If you were to create a disk image of the project instead of burning it, and got the same underrun error, then you would at least know it's not a burrner issue. To make a disk image you need to install two special files in your user directory. There is a link to them in anothr topic in this forum, but I don't seem to have it right now.

william

[willrob]

Here's a link to the two files that go in your personal User directory:

http://forum.firmware-flash.com/viewtopic.php?t=23370

Then you hold down the control key when clicking burn and you should be asked for a location for the disk image.

william

[macmelly]

Thanks for you help William!

Success! My project encoded using the easter egg method. Is this normal for projects greater than 60 minutes? Also, I was expecting a decrease in the quality of my project, but not this much. All my clips which were slowed down now appear jagged and my slideshow transitions are very pixelated...is this normal?

Thanks again.

Macmelly

[cbkilner]

I don't think that your problems are normal. My slo-mo and slide transitions look fine (except one player, my Toshiba SD-2900, has problems with cube transitions) and were burned at best quality, but were less than an hour and with 10.3.2 and iDVD 4.0.1.

It might just be that certain slide transitions look really bad at lower bit rates (apparently the cube transition is very high bit rate - that is generally the only thing that causes my Toshiba DVD player to stumble), but I don't think the slo-mo should be high bit rate, so I'm not sure what the issue is.

I would check Apple's support site and iDVD discussions.

[macmelly]

Hi Again,

The transitions are better on the TV than on my computer, but I discovered another problem possibly with the chapters created in imovie. I have 9 chapters in my project, and when playing the 5th chapter, the movie froze. However, the wierd thing was that the audio continued to play?! :S I tried not skipping through chapters but playing it in full and sure enough when it got to the same point, the video froze but audio continued. I couldn't FF either or go to the end and rewind. All chapters from 5-9 did the same thing. the audio would skip ahead but video remained frozen. I would have tried chapter selection, but I deleted it from my menu before encoding.

I should have watched the disc fully before haveing a premiere of it on the weekend to my friends!! doh

Any ideas??

Thanks,

Macmelly