DV format change from iMovie 2 to 3?

[DrHogie]

Hello all. I hope someone here can help me with this -- my situation is a bit weird, and I haven't been able to find any help anywhere else, so here goes . . .

I have a Sony DCR-TRV18 and a 500MHz iBook running OSX 10.2.4. The DVcam is for shooting home movie of my soon-to-be baby girl I'm wanting to create VCD/SVCDs to send to different family members, except I ran into a slight problem -- the G3 can't encode MPEG-2 to save it's life. I don't have another Mac, so I'm stuck trying to use the G3. Enter my PC (P3 450 w/ Win2K). After installing the PIXELA 1.0 software from Sony that came with the camcorder, it could read the DV files I exported from iMovie 2. The process:

--import to iMovie from DVCam
--edit in iMovie
--export via Full Quality DV Clip (file.dv)
--FTP over to my Win2K box
--rename file to file.avi
--Open TMPEGEnc
--Encode and Voila!

I tested it with a 4 minute test clip, and it ran and encoded it fine (~20min encoding time on the PC as opposed to the 5+ hours on the G3 using ffmpegX). I didn't get a chance to work on a "real" test SVCD until just now, and since iMovie 3 came out, why not use it

So I have my sample DV clip and I export it via Full Quality DV Clip. FTP it over, and fire up TMPGEnc. And . . . TMPEGEnc refuses to open the file. I still have the old test avi file from iMovie 2 -- and it works fine.

Poking around in iMovie 3, I see that I can no longer use the Export to iDVD option -- it wants a copy of iDVD since they're all integrated now. The options for DV are:

Codec: DV or DVCPro
Audio: Locked or not
Sample Rate: 32, 44.1, or 48 KHz

(EDIT: Under the DVCPro option, the audio/sample are greyed out and auto-set to 48 KHz. I have tried running the file on Win2K as audio locked or unlock and as 32/44.1/48 -- all 6 ways -- none of them work)

Does anyone know what happened to change the DV codec from iMovie 2 to 3, or where I can find a suitable codec/software to install on my PC to read the codec? I'm really at a loss as to what to do, other than to uninstall iMovie 3 and install iMovie 2.

Thanks in advance,
DrHogie

[wiedenu]

I noticed in your process that you renamed the file on your pc with an .avi extension. Did you do this the second time with iMovie 3?

Just wondering, but assuming you did this.

[luca]

I have also an iBook 500Mhz, and I can make SVCD from iMovie just fine,
following the instructions I found at

http://www.sjoki.uta.fi/~shmhav/SVCD_on_a_Macintosh.txt

Good luck,

Gianluca

[DrHogie]

Yes, I did update the file name to .avi on all attempts to convert on the Win2K box However, I wouldn't put it past me to be making a mistake elsewhere, so I re-tested (more on that in a sec).

I don't know if the mpeg2 encoder listed in the tutorial is any faster than mencoder (at least, that's what I think ffmpegX uses for it's MPEG-2 encoder), but I seriously doubt it's 20minutes fast as opposed to the 4-5+ hours it took before on the iBook. I don't even wanna think about trying to convert a full 60 minute movie -- which is why I wanna look into exporting my clips to the PC for SVCD conversion.

Anyway, I reinstalled iMovie 2.1.2 on my 10.2.4 box, and performed both:

Export -> To iDVD (created a .DV file)
and
Export -> Expert Settings -> Full Quality DV File (created a DV format .MOV file)

I FTP'd both to my Win2K box, changed the extension to .avi, and they both loaded into TMPGENc without a hitch! I downloaded the 3.0.2 upgrade to iMovie 3 today at work, so I tried to export a new clip from scratch, and with all the DV settings, it did not work. Of note is the fact that I can no longer export a DV file in iM3 via Export -> To IDVD.

So -- any thoughts on what i can look for on a format change, or does anyone know anything about this?

Thanks again,
Josh

[wiedenu]

This may have come about because they took away that output option to iDVD. This is probably because they have the new "DVD" button in the iMovie window that sends your iMovie to iDVD.

I don't know, but since you mentioned they took away that iDVD output option, that's what I thought of.