Imovie To Bluray On Standard Dvd Oddity

[Donna A.]

Hey, all,

 

I did a search but didn't find quite the same problem I've been having. I use iMovie HD (not the piece of garbage '08 version) to edit my high def video. I've created three Blu-Ray discs burned onto regular DVDs so far and haven't had any real problems but I noticed an oddity. The first disc I did, I exported from iMovie using AppleTV format. I thought the video quality could be better, so the next project was exported as a full resolution .mov file. I burned it in Blu-Ray format to a regular DVD and had no errors. I put the disc into my player and the video is "squished" horizontally and pillar boxed! I though maybe I missed a setting somewhere, so yesterday (snow day yay!) I created another full resolution .mov file from another project and then burned it as a Blu-Ray disc. That one is squished horizontally and pillar boxed, too!

 

Does anyone have any idea why my AppleTV format exported files work fine but the high quality, full resolution high-def .mov files result in squished pillar boxed video? The video looks great, but everyone is too tall and thin. A good thing for me, but not so good for others.

 

Thanks to anyone who can point me in the right direction.

 

Donna

[revwally]

You are exactly right in fact.

 

You have two options.

1) As stated above, when you export from iMovie export as 1920*1080 in Apple Intermediate Codec.

2) The other option is that you can stipulate the Toast 9 use MPEG-2 rather then MPEG-4 AVC. In my experience, Toast can properly encode 1440*1080 content with MPEG-2 but not MPEG-4 AVC.

 

I would suggest you go with option number 1. In a weird situation, granted this was from Final Cut Express, I actually found that my image quality improved considerably when I exported in 1920*1080 rather than 1440*1080 - I think this was largely due to the color depth and saturation at the higher resolution.

[pruthe]

Hey, all,

 

I did a search but didn't find quite the same problem I've been having. I use iMovie HD (not the piece of garbage '08 version) to edit my high def video. I've created three Blu-Ray discs burned onto regular DVDs so far and haven't had any real problems but I noticed an oddity. . .

 

The only way I've gotten the correct 16x9 perspective to burn on blu-ray is to export iMovie HD movie as a 1920x1080 quicktime movie, then bring this into Toast 9 as a video clip. Note that my Sony HD video cameras give either HDV or AVCHD with resolution of 1440x1080. When viewing in iMovie it shows expanded, but if you look at raw iMovie (Apple Intermediate) video, it's compressed as 1440x1080. I ran into same burn problem with Toast with compressed HD video and by exporting into 1920x1080, then bringing into Toast, it seems to be burning proper perspective OK now. You'll need a lot of space on home drive using iMovie to export since it uses temp files there during convert. You'll also probably lose any chapter markers in exported Quicktime file. You can use Quicktime Pro to retrieve chapter markers in original raw iMovie QT file, then copy over to exported QT file using Add Scaled function. After this is done, Toast should see chapter markers in exported QT file when brought in as video clip.

 

If anyone has a better way to get correct 16x9 perspective of 1440x1080 HD files burned as blu-ray in Toast 9.0.4, I'd be interested in hearing.

 

pruthe

 

 

[Donna A.]

I think you're onto something with the dimensions. I'll check into that to see the difference between QT export and AppleTV export. When I did the export as a QT movie and as AppleTV, all the chapter markers came over just fine. I have a bunch of hard drive space so that's not a worry.

 

Thanks!

 

Donna

[Donna A.]

I just wanted to post a follow-up to let everyone know that setting the resolution to 1920x1080 solved my problem! I burned two discs and they worked properly. Yay!

 

Donna

[Donna A.]

I would suggest you go with option number 1. In a weird situation, granted this was from Final Cut Express, I actually found that my image quality improved considerably when I exported in 1920*1080 rather than 1440*1080 - I think this was largely due to the color depth and saturation at the higher resolution.

 

Thank you! I just looked at the AppleTV file I exported and it's 960x540. That one comes out 16:9 when burned. If I double the dimensions of that, it comes out to 1920x1080, exactly what you said above. I'll do my next export at those dimensions using Apple Intermediate and it *should* work.

 

Thanks again for your response. It's greatly appreciated!

 

Now, back to my summer vacation videos.

 

Donna