I have a fairly complex iMovie project. 1hour 29 minutes. I have shared to iDVD and made a disc image. In spite of doing this twice the resulting image when burned to a dvd freezes at the same point every time in both a pc and two dvd players. The original iMovie seems to have nothing special at that point - not even a clip join and no added sound.

Tried using Toast 7 ( very new to it) to do the same and the resulting disc image has menus, good sound (both from the original camcorder and the overlaid commentary) but NO VIDEO PICTURE at all!! A black screen in mac dvd player and same if I burn a dvd and try a dvd player. The disc image "xxxx.toast" file seems quite small - 1.39GB [/b]

Any thoughts how to get out of these problems?

Had another go with toast. This time cut the imovie down in the content area to 59 seconds. Set to "save as disc image" and again no picture just sound in the resulting xxxxx.toast image file. Do I have to do something special with the imovie project file? I have tried dragging it in and also clicking on it in the Toast media pane.

Are you using Toast 7.0.2? There was a problem with the earlier version and iMovie.

The disc image created by Toast from your 88-minute iMovie should have been about 4 GB. When you click the Edit button next to the title in the Video window, does the iMovie play okay in the preview window?

Regarding your the DVD you burned from your iDVD disc image, what media did you use? Did you try with a different brand of disc? I'm just trying to rule out the possibility that the problem could be media specific. If you mount the iDVD disc image and play it with DVD player does the freeze happen with it as well?

You could try mounting the iDVD disc image, choose DVD with the top button in the Toast Media Browser, go to the title level with the bottom button and drag the title from the disc image to the Toast Video window. Toast will then extract the MPEG video from the iDVD disc image. Now set up the menu the way you want and click the burn button. This may get you a DVD that doesn't freeze, and since Toast isn't encoding the video it will retain the picture.

After much searching I found this in Roxann:-

"Toast is incorrectly burning DVDs from iMovie projects that have chapter markers. The audio is burned onto the DVD, but there is no video. The issue is a result of not all the iMovie pointers being detected. To fix this:
Delete the chapter markers in iMovie (under the iDVD tab).
Save the project and quit iMovie.
Burn the iMovie project to a DVD as normal.
Note: this issue will be fixed in a future free Toast 7 update."


I am acting accordingly and trying to create a .toast file with Toast having removed quite a number of chapter markers in iMovie.


I have also just downloaded 7.0.2 but I assume that has not dealt with the above problem or presumably Roxann would have said so.


If this new .toast file burns OK using either disc utility or Toast then hey presto problem solved. If not then I shall study your instructions in detail and try something else. The .ing file played fine in dvd player - it was the disc burned with disc utility which gives trouble.

PS I have only used the same make of dvds so far but I have burned two from two different .ing files (both from the same imovie project using iDVD) and they both froze at exactly the same point so I doubt if it is the physical discs.

Anyway as I said in my last post I, hopefully, have a solution cutting out iDVD and using Toast now I know how to get out of the "no video" problem. If the resultant disc freezes at the same point it must be something in the iMovie project although as I said before there is no obvious cause - no clip join, added audio or anything.


If that does not work I can see me resorting to extreme measures such as exporting the imovie project via camcorder to record in Eye TV!! Don't know what the quality would be like!


Thanks again for all your help tsantee.

David

This is from the description of fixes in Toast 7.0.2: "iMovie 5 projects with chapter markers are now correctly burned to DVD."

So I think that issue is fixed in 7.0.2. If the chapter markers are important to you, give it another go.

Thanks tsantee

I have been discussing in the Apple site as well and it may well not be the image creation stage. I am going to try different media and burning software, speed etc. I may be trying to be too quick.

I took out the chapter markers and now have a disc image via Toast. It was clear right away that things were better as the file size showed nearly full before I clicked to create.

As 7.0.2 seems to have sorted the chapter markers problem I shall redo again as I would like them in.

Thanks a lot for your help


PS I am in iMovie 6 but I would not expect that to matter.