marriage video from iMovie to VCD, how long to encode still?

[reinderrustema]

Hi,

I made a 38min marriage video with iMovie for a friend (big fun, easy though labourintensive) and I want to make it into VCDs to distribute amongst the attendees. I exported a QuickTime movie with Optimal Quality from iMovie. This took a little more than an hour. Marriage.mov is now about 8Gb or something. Then I dropped this on Toast to turn into a Video CD. Something popped up asking me about the quality, I asked the best of course. Now it is busy encoding. For 7 hours already! The progress bar is at 1/4th.

Did I make the right choices? How long will it take? 21hours more? I am using a new iMac with about 300Mb RAM and 30Gb disk for it. For the moment I am letting it encode, unless I read a reply to this posting suggesting a better solution.

I am a newbie in this field and I used a document called 'Turning iMovies into Video CDs' as my guide.

Any help greatly appreciated!

[tgpo]

I have a 450mhz G4 and it would take roughly 8-9 hours to complete half of a movie, so roughly 45-50min. The process is slow, but you have to remember the amount of compression it is having to complete. Plus if you select the better quality it does take longer. At least once you finish the first one you can just copy it for the rest of the guests.

[reinderrustema]

I turned out that the machine was hanging when I wrote it. In the end I used Toast 5.2 and iMovie export function. It worked very well, it took about 200minutes. A MOV file ended up on my desktop, I dropped it on Toast and it gave a VCD. Now I am curious to see on which DVD players it will work or won't.

[jchansen]

Since you haven't done this before, you probably haven't made any comparisons. The Toast method is really easy, but the output is not very good. Download ffmpegX (for OS X), which uses a better quality encoder.

[reinderrustema]

Thanks! And it's freeware too! I will give it a try. Is the difference really significant, visable? I already send the VCD away for distribution, but I could revoke it if it is worth the hassle. It looks like a great little program, it can convert anything into anything!

[jchansen]

Well, the big question is: how did your video look on VCD? Are you satisfied with it? I think that Toast is unacceptable, personally. Yes, there is an appreciable difference, and ffmpegX will create variable bitrate VCDs, which will look better, although they may not be as compatible with all players. Then again, not all players play VCDs anyways.

Did you actually look at it before sending it off?

[reinderrustema]

Yes, I did take a quick look at it. Up close it seemed a little less than VHS quality to me (on my computerscreen) but with a little distance it was sort of sufficient. Could be better. I made real credits scrolling at the end, that was most of all damaged. Bearly legible.

I was wondering, the video was only 381Mb in size while the VCD can hold 650Mb. The compression could be less, to fill the VCD to the brim with data and improve picture quality. I guess that MPEG-1 doesn't have that option... Would be nice though.