idvd unexpectedly quits when burning

[AKAAM]

I'm wondering if anyone can help me. I took a home movie that I had cut on to VHS a few years ago and put it on to digital tape with my video camera. I then imported it into imovie 5.02. While editing this project, sometimes imovie would quit unexpectedly. I thought I solved it by trimming the start and end of the project.
However, when I put the project in idvd, I can't burn the project to a disk image. It goes through the burning process, rendering menus and processing the video, but then at the end the application quits and all is lost. Previewing the project works fine.
I've never run across this before, but it is the first time I've used footage from VHS. I've put a lot of time in making the dvd menus so would like to salvage it if possible. I've got a lot of clips running in the drop zones (11 in the main menu, 3 in the special features, and 18 in the chapter menus). Maybe there's just too much going on? Should I change the dv still images to jpg ones?
Any ideas on what I should do to try and make this a success? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[terryj]

Yes, it sounds like it is having a hard time encoding all your
menus. Simplify the menus somewhat, build the project
to VIDEO_TS folders,and then burn outside of iDVD 5
using Toast 6.

Perhaps go down to 5 in the main menu,
one on the Special feature,
and simplify the Chapter menus to be still jpg images.

that should help it out somewhat. Also, since you are on an
iBook ( looks that way from your specs?), make sure
not to be running anything else while its trying to mux (build).

[AKAAM]

OK. Will try that. How do I build to video_ts folders? Achive it? I tried again last night and it failed again. I tried following some other ideas I found on the net: emptied the safari cache, deleted the encoded assets in the advanced menu, ran disk repairs, but still didn't work. Will try to simplify the menus and burn to video ts (if you can tell me how! Thank you!).

[AKAAM]

Actually, when you say burn to video ts folders, you mean make a disk image, don't you? I am such a newbie...

I also think I may have found the problem. When I originally imported the VHS tape to imovie through my video camera, I found the start of the video would glitch and quit imovie whenever I used the reverse arrow to take me back to the beginning of the clip. I had deleted the first few frames and thought that had solved it but when I tried doing the same thing in the idvd preview mode (going back to the 1st chapter) it caused idvd to immediately shut down giving me the same "an unexpected error has occured" message that was waiting for me after my burn attempts. I went back to imovie, trimmed even more of the start and no more glitches. Will try burning the dvd tonight and see if that solves it. I also reduced the video on my menus so that should at least reduce the time it'll take to encode.
Will let you know...!

[AKAAM]

Well, it didn't work. I went through all the footage in imovie and in idvd in the preview mode and there are no glitches. I'm at a bit of a loss now.

I have one 20 minute movie imported from imovie. That has 15 chapters. I have 2 imovie projects that have been converted to quicktime files and were imported to idvd. I have a main menu with 12 drop zones and the chapter menus have a drop zone for each chapter. The menu for the 2 quicktime movies has 3 drop zones. Background music is down to a minute for each menu.

I recently got an external hard drive and my imovie project and quicktime movies are on that drive, and the idvd application as well as some of the drop zone images are on the ibook. Could that be part of the problem?
Only other thing I can think of trying is to delete the idvd project and re-import the imovie flick and build up the menus again. Maybe I'll try to move everything from the external drive to the ibook as well, but that defeats the purpose of having the external drive, really.

Does anyone have any other suggestions?

[AKAAM]

Just to update anyone out there who might have had the same problems as I did trying to burn VHS footage to idvd: I got my project to burn to disk successfully.
I went back to my imovie project and trimmed the start where I had the jumpy video from before. Then I did the same with the imovie projects where I had created my 2 quicktime (dv.) movies from. I re-shared those projects to dv. and sent the main movie to idvd. I also made sure I had no chapter marker at the start of any of projects.
I tried burning just the original imovie with the first theme that shows up and that finally worked. Then I added the video clips to the drop zones and burned that: it also worked. Finally I added the quicktime files and they worked as well.
Aside from trimming away the jumpy clips and removing the 1st chapter marker, I used MacJanitor and ran disk repair permissons. But I think it was the jumpy clips that were causing the problems because both imovie and idvd had the same error message. Deleting the plist file didn't do anything.
Hope this helps someone out there.

[Manny C]

Last time I tried to use iDVD it kept crashing on me in the middle of encoding. I was going crazy trying to figure out what the problem was. Then I went into preferences and changed the quality/performance setting and everything worked fine from that point on.