Poor Quality

[jonlor]

I have a question is it toast 11 or iMovie that is putting out such poor quality when burning a DVD? I am using lion 10.7. If I spend another 20.00 dollars the the HD upgrade will it work for me? I was using disk Creator from the app store and the quality was perfect. I thought spending 100.00 would do the trick but I guess not. Can anyone help here?

[tsantee]

There are several recent comments about poor quality with Toast when the source is from iMovie. What are the specs of the iMovie? These are shown in the Toast window after you add the video to Toast. How did you add the video from iMovie to Toast? Are you viewing the finished DVD on your Mac or on a TV? If on the Mac be sure to view it at normal (or actual) size and not at full screen to evaluate the quality.

 

It appears I need to do some iMovie exports to Toast to see what results I get, but I want to start with source videos that are similar to yours and any others who are experiencing quality problems.

[jonlor]

There are several recent comments about poor quality with Toast when the source is from iMovie. What are the specs of the iMovie? These are shown in the Toast window after you add the video to Toast. How did you add the video from iMovie to Toast? Are you viewing the finished DVD on your Mac or on a TV? If on the Mac be sure to view it at normal (or actual) size and not at full screen to evaluate the quality.

 

It appears I need to do some iMovie exports to Toast to see what results I get, but I want to start with source videos that are similar to yours and any others who are experiencing quality problems.

[jonlor]

Thanks for your response. What I a have done is this. Instead of finalizing the project in iMovie I changed the project to export as a Mpeg-4 instead of it saving as H.264 encoding. I also purchased the upgrade for burning HD from Roxio another 20.00. I after that realized that if you burn in HD mode it will only play the disc in a blu ray player. Not all my relatives have a blu ray player. So I re-burnt the Mpeg file dvd in standard mode from iMovie to toast and that improved video quality and allowed the disk to be played in anyones blu-ray player. I have a feeling that it could be iMovie that was the issue but not sure. The video was originally captured on a flip HD camcorder older model which has it's own issues. I am hoping that I did not waste 120.00 for toast. As an example I used disc creator app to burn a dvd and it was alright. Disc creator has it own problems as an example if you put music in on the menu it only plays for 20 seconds. So I was able to get a refund on that software which was 40.00. I would think that having a brand new high end mac I should be ok. One other note i burned a movie trailer from toast and it copied perfectly to play on a standard dvd player I am so confused. I will try different videos through toast and see if my work around is successful. I just think toast should burn what it sees. I also noticed that if you burn a dvd with a menu on toast you can not burn music along with the menu screen and let it play till someone hits the play button their dvd. I am not sure if any of this makes sense. What do you think? I heard that issues like this in the final cut program would not be an issue quite expensive. One question. I have an older HI-8 camcorder and toast doesn't allow it to capture video I used to use Sony video capture and it was perfect.

[tsantee]

As for the lack of audio in a Toast video DVD menu, that's the way it's always been with Toast. The menus are very basic and there is no option for audio. There also is no option for audio to accompany of DVD slide show with Toast, unlike iDVD. Your MPEG 4 export from iMovie should be lesser quality than the h.264 export (which also is a form of MPEG 4). The process for using iMovie with Toast is to first choose Share to Media Browser in the iMovie Share menu. That renders a high-quality version of the movie that can then be accessed via the Toast Media Browser. To add the movie to Toast click the Video tab in the Toast Media Browser and select iMovie. There you'll find your iMovie project file to drag to the main Toast window.

 

The video from your Flip HD recorder should be 720p. It takes Toast awhile to convert this to an anamorphic 16:9 standard definition video but it should look very good. I have a Kodak video camera similar to that Flip and in the past it worked well with Toast. However, recent posts are making me wonder if something is haywire with the latest update to Toast when converting from HD to SD video. I've been really busy with holiday-season projects and haven't had time to check into this myself.

 

The Sony unit is a good device for converting analog video such as that on your Hi-8 camcorder, to DVD.