Resolution And Aspect Ratio

[Prof.Cheese]

I'm new to Toast and hoping it will replace iDVD as my creator of choice. Having tried burning some movies I've found it hard to get a resolution that is equivalent to the original file. Also, it seems to find it hard to keep the aspect ratio of the film. The online help section in the software takes me to a dead page on the site. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

[tsantee]

MPEG 2 compression is much smaller than whatever is your source video's codec. Since you have FCP you can use Compressor to create a mpeg-2 video. The result should be a .m2v video file and an .ac3 audio file. Drag the .m2v to the Toast window and it will automatically include the .ac3 if it is in the same folder and has the same name (except for extension) as the .m2v. If Toast can't find the .ac3 it will ask you to locate it. This way Toast won't do any encoding. If it does want to encode instead of multiplex you can tell Toast to Never Re-encode in the custom encoder settings window.

[Prof.Cheese]

Excellent - i'll give that a go. Thanks for your help!

[gspanos]

I'm new to Toast and hoping it will replace iDVD as my creator of choice. Having tried burning some movies I've found it hard to get a resolution that is equivalent to the original file. Also, it seems to find it hard to keep the aspect ratio of the film. The online help section in the software takes me to a dead page on the site. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

 

You realize, of course, that your menu options are greatly limited when using Toast as your DVD creator. You can't even name individual chapters of items like the songs of full concert videos unless you break your project into individual files for each song. iDVD is far superior to Toast in terms of making professional-looking DVDs. DVD Studio Pro is even better, although I'm not sure if it addresses the your aspect issue.

[tsantee]

Toast should automatically retain the aspect ratio as long as the source video is not a non-standard size. Tell me the specs of your source video and I can tell you if that isn't standard. As for the picture quality, it should look just as good as with iDVD. It won't look as good as the original if it is from a camera that took the video in high definition (which is nearly every camera today). Toast encodes a 720x480 DVD the same as iDVD. If that is the resolution of your source video then it should look much the same after encoding with Toast unless the video is more than 2 hours in length.

[Prof.Cheese]

Thanks for the reply. The source video is 720 x 576, film length about 8 mins (although the camera does HD it was set for SD) - i managed to get the aspect ratio sorted by changing the automatic setting over to wide screen. But I noticed that the file size of the film was reduced to about 300mb from its 2 - 3gb original size. If I was to create a DVD image straight from final cut pro it is vastly superior to an external DVD creator. The problem with using FCP is that it only creates a DVD of the current film and I need to create compilation DVDs.