Burn VCD with iMovie?

[RangerJay]

I'm new to this. I just got a Sony Digital8 camera to do video editing with iMovie on my Mac G4. I understand it's possible to burn a Video CD with my CDRW. I have Toast Titanium Lite and the full version of 4.1. Is there something else I need? And how do I proceed? Is there a website or archive that will walk me through the process?

Basically, I'd like to create movies to view and send and, if quality permits, archive them on CD instead of tape.

Thanks.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: RangerJay on 2001-12-28 21:18:31 ]</font>

[major]

Toast Titanium (i don't know about the lite version) installs a "Toast Video CD" extension in your system folder. When this is present, you can open your iMovie footage with Quicktime player, select "Export" and then "Toast Video CD". Click on settings to define aspect ratio, then go. This will convert your movie to a Video CD MPG file. Then burn that file with Toast in Video CD mode.

Toast Titanium for Mac OSX comes with a "ToastVideoCDSupport.component" in the Library/Quicktime folder. If you copy it in your OS9 extensions folder and delete the original "Toast Video CD" extension, it will do the same job as the old extension, but with the precious addition of a "slower - high quality" conversion mode which will end up in a slightly better image result.

You should know that image size and quality of a Video CD is anyway much lower than DV video.

If you want to keep high image quality and still play the result on a DVD player you should make a SuperVideoCD (SVCD). This has already been extensively discussed in this forum and need PC emulated software for encoding / muxing.

[mathias.wagner]

Do I understand you right that this Toast Video CD Extension enables you to open the iMovie footage from within the QT Pro player? I can open individual clips from within QT Pro, but not the enire movie. In particular, all the effects and additional audio tracks are lost.

[major]

you must first export your iMovie project as a Quicktime movie

[mathias.wagner]

That's what I thought, too, and that's where the problems starts, as people have discovered in another thread: I can't open 'Export to QuickTime' any longer from within iMovie ever since this new plugin is installed in the iMovie folder...

[major]

the Toast extension you should use is the one in the system folder (or in library/quicktime if OSX, as said above) not the one in the iMovie plugins folder

so I would suggest to move the "Toast Video CD Export" from your iMovie plugins folder to the trash and then restart iMovie

does this solve the problem?

[mathias.wagner]

I am afraid it does not. When I remove the Toast Video CD Export plugin from the Plugins Folder of iMovie, iMovie will start up as usual with the default Export to Quicktime menu - i.e there is no mentioning of exporting anything to video CD or whatever. Only the standard small/medium/large/expert choices... So the choice appears to be having no QuickTime Export Menu at all or the default one.

[major]

you should try to use the standard export to quicktime and export to a good quality format, then quit iMovie, open that new exported quicktime movie into quicktime player, and finally choose Export to Video CD (which uses the Toast Video CD extension located in the System Folder)

[mathias.wagner]

hmm, thanks. That seems to degrade the quality, I would think. But I guess there is no other way. But still, it is rather disappointing not to be able to do any better on a Mac...

[DViant]

If you've been having problems exporting your iMovie to VCDs then download the 5.1.2 update at http://www.roxio.com/toastosx/download.jhtml

HTH

[mathias.wagner]

Hi, thanks a lot for pointing this out to me! It definitely is an improvement, as now - at last - I have the Toast menu entries in the QuickTime menu in iMovie. HOWEVER, there are still problems: I create a Quicktime movie alright from within iMovie using the Toast/PAL option in the Export/QT menu. The resulting file I load into QT Pro and it works just fine, smooth and all that. Then I create the VCD using Toast 5.12 by dropping this QT file onto the Toast window. This rattles off and burns the CD. When I then open the resulting video.mov file on the CD, I get jumpy frames every once in a while and square blobs, not at all unlike those when there are problems in the integrity of digital image data. Of course, the DVD player shows the same blobs. I've wasted two CDs on this, having the second burned at only speed 1x, but to no avail. Haven't decided yet whether to go windows or mad

[Jimp]

Sorry to jump into your conversation, but I am having problems trying to make a VCD from MPG video clips (music).

I only have version 5 of quicktime player, and not quicktime pro - would this be the reason I cant encode the video AND sound track, so far I have been able to make a MPEG file which just contains the video.

Jim