What To Convert To For Imovie?

[Morrislives]

My daughter was featured on a television segment today which I recorded and burned onto a DVD for the purpose of bringing into iMobie 11, editing, and then posting to YouTube. I [thought I] went through the steps by launching Toast, and seeing (and reading from) the DVD disk selected, and under summary it says Main (0:4:34 4.3 NTSC), then hitting the Convert button. And despite choosing several format options...Mp4, DV, QuickTime, etc., NONE of them are readable by iMovie.

 

Then, when I chose to simply upload to YouTube (without trying to import in iMovie), I only got 43 seconds of video.

 

Can someone steer me in the right direction? I wanted to surprise my daughter before going on an out-of-town business trip tomorrow morning. Thanks!!

[tsantee]

The AppleTV preset should work fine for import to iMovie, as should the others you tried. I assume you have a standalone DVD recorder that was used to make the DVD disc. Those can have an issue with time code breaks that can interrupt a conversion. If that is the case here there a couple workarounds. One is to first use the freeware app MPEG Streamclip to repair the timecode breaks. Streamclip also can do the conversion or you can choose Save as MPEG and add the repaired video to Toast's convert window with Video Files selected as the format. MPEG Streamclip requires Apple's $20 QuickTime MPEG 2 Playback Component.

 

Another workaround if you still have the program on a DVR is to burn a RW DVD using the recorder's VR mode. There won't be any timecode breaks. Don't finalize the VR-mode recording. Launch Toast before inserting the burned VR-mode disc in the Macs drive. Click the Video tab in the Toast Media Browser and choose in the list. You should see the video title from the disc to copy over to the main Toast window with Video Files selected as the format. You also can do this same process with your existing DVD disc to see if using that approach gets you different results.

 

Something that may be even easier is to use open of your previous Toast exports in QuickTime Player and use its Share menu to send it to YouTube. If that option is greyed out then you can first use QuickTime Player to save the video in the correct format for upload to YouTube.

[Morrislives]

Thanks so much for your reply!

 

As luck would have it, when I tried to buy/download that MPEG Component from Apple's web site last night, the "store" was closed down for maintenance. Oh well, a friend of hers videotaped it from the television and posted it onto YouTube.

 

But it looks like I'll be needed that component for future use anyway. Thanks again!